LAURA Ford: Seen and Unseen is modern, contemporary sculpture at its very best.

Of course, like all art, highly subjective, but it will be fascinating to see the response to the exhibition, which runs at Abbot Hall Art Gallery until June 25 and at Lakeland Arts' sister venue Blackwell, The Arts and Crafts House, at Bowness, until September 4.

You could title Laura's show 'extraordinary creatures,' such is its fantastical content.

Ingeniously dashed with humour but underpinned by a darker side, her characters populate the Kendal gallery like you've never seen before. Particularly, the parade of padded penguins, steel armatures 'dressed to distress' that give you an unsettling stare.

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Laura is one of the UK's most original sculptors, a terrific talent and well-known for her portrayals of animals. Although, she describes her own work as sculptures dressed as people who are dressed as animals.

The exhibition was originally conceived by Stephen Feeke, director of the New Art Centre, Roche Court, and has been reconfigured with additional content selected by Lakeland Arts in collaboration with Laura.

Playful yet cleverly engaging with social and political issues, Laura's fabulous figures perch between the realms of fantasy and reality, childhood and adulthood.

Check out her fur-clad Medieval Cloud Girls that skulk in Abbot Hall’s opulent silk-lined Saloon. You can't see their faces but you sense anger within, creating a disturbing counterpoint to the dancing, fresh-faced children in Romney’s The Gower Family.

Born and bred in South Wales, Laura's parents were fairground people, who toured the country and eventually settled on a farm near Cardiff that was formerly a zoo. No doubt fabulous fodder for her fertile imagination.

On the surface her life-size Punch and Judy figures convey a simple tenderness - but a hidden menace lies below.

Another wonderfully winning - and entertaining - sculpture is the Waldegrave Poodles, based on Joshua Reynolds The Ladies Waldegrave painting. As classically elegant and sophisticated as Reynolds conversation piece, Laura's depicted the Waldegrave sisters, the grandnieces of the author and antiquarian Horace Walpole, in bronze.

There's also the bronze Rag and Bone Squirrels, based, according to Laura, on the homeless of Kentish Town, a theme prevalent in several of her other brilliantly imaginative works.

Outside at Blackwell, a group of tall, skinny cats, purr and pace on the south lawn at the Bowness house in various states of deep thought. Depicted in a series of bronze sculptures, Laura's Days of Judgement cats appear like a group of existential poets gripped by their own inner anxieties, prowling in the grounds against the spectacular backdrop of the Coniston fells. Elsewhere, it might appear that Beatrix Potter’s much-loved Lakeland characters have fallen on hard times, with a Mrs Tiggy-Winkle-like hedgehog transformed into a bronze bag lady, and a badger who has resorted to foraging in dustbins. Yet again, Laura's mammals carry a moral message.

The must-see exhibition will also highlight other aspects of Laura's practice such as her ceramic works, including Bear, In Remembrance and Needy Greedy, along with new ceramics made in direct response to Blackwell which fit brilliantly with Lakeland Arts’ collection of historic and contemporary pottery. This association is taken a step further through the artist’s series of prints inspired by the most celebrated of the Arts and Crafts ceramicists, William De Morgan, whose lustrous tiles adorn many of Blackwell’s fireplaces. The show will present other graphic works, in which Laura not only explores ideas and variations relating to her sculpture but also allows her amazing imagination to run free, creating delicate line drawings and vivid watercolours that exist as finished artworks in their own right.

Laura studied at Bath Academy of Art between 1978-82, including a period at the Cooper Union School of Art, New York. Her tutors included Michael Pennie, Richard Deacon, Nick Pope, Antony Gormley, and Anish Kapoor. She was included in New Contemporaries in 1982 before joining the postgraduate sculpture course at Chelsea School of Art in London.

While still a student, she participated in the 1983 survey exhibition, The Sculpture Show at The Serpentine and Hayward galleries alongside artists such as Richard Wentworth, Tony Cragg, and David Nash, and 27 years later she featured in The British Art Show 5 alongside a new array of British creators that included Phyllida Barlow, Jeremy Deller, Michael Landy and Susan Hiller, Tracy Emin and Sarah Lucas. In 2005 she represented Wales in the Venice Biennale.

During the intervening years and beyond she has had numerous solo and group shows around the world and her work is represented in many public collections like the Tate, The Victoria and Albert Museum, the Government Art Collection, National Museums and Gallery of Wales, Museum of Modern Art, University of Iowa, Arts Council of Great Britain as well as numerous private collections.

Meanwhile, in total contrast elsewhere in the Kendal gallery - and proving once more that Abbot Hall truly is one of the UK's most important regional galleries - hangs Rembrandt’s Self Portrait at the Age of 63, gracing the walls of Abbot Hall from Saturday (March 19) until May 15 as part of the National Gallery Masterpiece Tour.

For further information telephone Abbot Hall on 01539-722464.