PROJECT STATEMENT

Laura Rosengren, 2023

In “The Book Opened Me”, artist Laura Rosengren has created a series of mixed-material paintings exploring notions of becoming.  She is interested in the collapse of interior and exterior space, in performative looking and the impact of proximity.  Her work starts with an image fragment – whether imagined or photographic, that then lives many lives through a cumulative process of making and unmaking. She will draw, colour, collage, paint, photograph, photocopy and felt the same image, moving them through an assembly of shapes, narrative formations, and soft and crusty surfaces.

An ongoing pursuit for the artist is considering how motherhood might expand rather than limit artistic practice. Her varied processes reflect the conditions of her making – mining spaces between meals and baths, resetting after interruptions and accumulation but also drawing on the fantastical and barely decipherable messages slid under her studio door. Something being done and undone and re-done, every day, and out of the apparent futility, something also continuous and forming.

ARTIST BIO

Laura Rosengren(she/her) is a Canadian artist currently living and working on Stó:lō territory near Chilliwack, BC. Her practice involves a mixed material approach to painting and considers questions around motherhood and labour. Laura has a BFA from the Alberta University of the Arts, and an MA from Regent College. She has received project grants from Canada Council for the Arts and BC Arts Council, as well as Re-Paint history in 2022, an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2021 and she was a finalist for the 2021 Salt Spring National Art Prize. She has participated in exhibitions across Canada and internationally including the Reach Museum in Abbotsford, BC, Spilt Milk Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland, Fort Gallery in Fort Langley, BC, as well as a recent solo exhibition at Fifty Fifty Arts Collective in Victoria, BC.