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Laura Oldfield Ford (born 1973) is a British artist and psychogeographer. Her photorealist work, in ballpoint pen, acrylic paint and spray paint, is politically-motivated and focuses on British urban areas. Oldfield Ford publishes a blog titled Savage Messiah, which was also the name of a zine published from 2005 to 2009.

Early life
Oldfield Ford grew up in Halifax, West Yorkshire in a community hit by the decline of the textile industry. In Leeds and later in London, she became involved in the punk, rave and squatting scenes and produced zines and posters influenced by Raymond Pettibon, Linder Sterling and Jon Savage. She took her Bachelor of Arts at the Slade Art School and her Master of Arts at the Royal College of Art (RCA). At the RCA's graduation show in 2007 she exhibited a four-section painting depicting herself in each panel as a heroine resembling Lara Croft, against a backdrop of urban chaos.

Savage Messiah
Savage Messiah, which takes its name from H. S. Ede's biography of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, was self-published from 2005 to 2009. Each issue focuses on a different London postcode.

In 2008 Owen Hatherley named Savage Messiah 10: Abandoned London as one of his "books of the year", describing it as "an oneiric vision of a depopulated, post-catastrophe capital, pieced together from snatched conversations and reminiscences, set in a landscape of the labyrinthine ruins of 1960s architecture and today's negative-equity banlieue." In 2011, Hari Kunzru listed Verso Books's publication of Savage Messiah in book form as a "book of the year" and described it as "a wake-up call to anyone who can only see modern cities through the lens of gentrification." In a 2013 review for the American Book Review, Sukhdev Sandhu described the Verso publication as an example of "invisible literature" and "avant-pulp psychogeography" able "to rekindle erased histories of popular dissent from the 1970s to the 1990s", and one relevant to "a new and possibly endless age of austerity".

Exhibitions
From January until March 2009, a collection of her work entitled "London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins", including all ten issues of Savage Messiah, was featured in London's Hales Gallery. Oldfield Ford was one of three artists whose work was exhibited as part of "Slump City" at SPACE in June 2009. Another exhibition, "Britannia 2013–1981" ran in Hatfield from November 2009 until January 2010. In February 2011, Oldfield Ford's work was on display in Bristol as a part of Poster Sites, a project commissioned by Arnolfini.

Themes and practise
Skye Sherwin of The Guardian writes that Oldfield Ford's work "focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed, which regeneration seeks to concrete over: city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise, with their Escher-like walkways and bleak 'recreational' open spaces." These include the East End of London and the new towns of Harlow, Hatfield and Stevenage. Her work on the East End is critical of the 2012 Summer Olympics, held in London, and the associated development program, in particular the urban regeneration process surrounding the Olympic Park.

In the Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Andrew Harris writes that "London 2013, Drifting Through the Ruins" "attempts to reactivate more conflictual architectural, political and aesthetic strategies that have been largely erased by the widespread gentrification of London since the 1970s" and is an example of an intervention which offers "an important and neglected resource for complicating, disrupting and re-visioning understandings of urban change". Paul Gravett describes Oldfield Ford's work as being fuelled by a longing for a past incarnation of the punk subculture and a "recovery of punk's provocation and politicisation".

She describes her practise as centring around walks through London and the creation of "emotional maps". Oldfield Ford has said "I regard my work as diaristic; the city can be read as a palimpsest, of layers of erasure and overwriting. The need to document the transient and ephemeral nature of the city is becoming increasingly urgent as the process of enclosure and privatisation continues apace."

Other work
A short story by Oldfield Ford entitled "Liebe and Romanze" was published in Punk Fiction: An Anthology of Short Stories Inspired by Punk, edited by Janine Bullman. Her work was also featured in Urban Constellations, a 2011 collection edited by Matthew Gandy.