In this SHIFT film, Laura Yuile reflects on how her artistic practice and research shapes her approach to teaching across contexts in the UK and China; observing and directly responding to the material conditions of her surroundings while imbedding the importance of fieldwork to enable critical engagement as part of her teaching practice.
Having spent the past three years working within a transnational university partnership in China, and now preparing to return to the UK, the film traces Laura's movement between and response to specific educational, cultural and spatial conditions. Working on projects including Heavy View, ASSET ARREST, Museum of Modern Shopping, and her ongoing research titled “Yiwucore,” Laura explores how surfaces, systems and speculative futures in the form of 'ghosts' structure everyday environments, from luxury property developments to global commodity networks.
At the Institute for Creativity and Innovation, a partnership between the University for the Creative Arts and Xiamen University, she has attempted to translate these concerns into a site-responsive pedagogy. Through workshops, field trips and collaborative activities with students, they are encouraged to engage directly with their surroundings - entering real estate developments, exploring shopping environments, and responding to unfinished urban zones - treating them as sites of research and production. This has included establishing a space in the local village for exhibitions and events, which is now collectively run by ICI staff and associates, and is a place that can forge encounters between the communities that inhabit both the campus and the village.
Moving fluidly between practice, research and pedagogy, the film considers teaching as a form of artistic inquiry: a way of navigating complex infrastructures through observation, participation and experimentation, and of finding ways to work within - and through - the shifting conditions of contemporary life. As she prepares to return to the UK, these methods remain in motion, shaped by context, and open to being reconfigured in relation to new environments.
SHIFT: Laura Yuile
Artist, researcher and educator Laura Yuile traces her exploration of surfaces, systems and ghosts to inform her methodology of site-specific and culturally responsive pedagogies when teaching across contexts in the UK and China.
Rather than treating teaching as something separate from its environment, I work with these conditions directly. I take students out into these sites. We walk through unfinished developments. We visit constructed environments. We use them as prompts for making and thinking.
About the artist
Laura Yuile is an artist, researcher and educator from Glasgow whose work has recently explored the cultural infrastructures of real estate, retail and global commodity systems. Working across installation, video, writing, performance, events and curatorial projects, her practice examines how surfaces, systems and speculative futures shape everyday environments, from luxury property developments to shopping centres and sites of mass production. Long-term projects such as ASSET ARREST (a podcast series that infiltrates and disseminates the exclusive spaces of financialised housing) and Museum of Modern Shopping operate as research platforms, combining fieldwork, exhibitions, podcasts and public interventions.
Her teaching is closely intertwined with this practice. She has recently been working as Lecturer in Digital Media Arts at the Institute for Creativity and Innovation (a partnership between the University for the Creative Arts and Xiamen University), developing site-responsive approaches that encourage students to engage directly with their surroundings. Her approach positions teaching as a form of artistic research, using observation, participation and experimentation to navigate the shifting conditions of contemporary life. She will be returning to the UK to begin a new chapter, in summer 2026.
About this film
This film is part of SHIFT – Freelands Foundation’s seasonal series of short films spotlighting varied practices, approaches and philosophies within art education.
All audiovisual material, images and research is courtesy of the artist.
Captions and editing by Sixbetween.
© Freelands Foundation, 2026