by Paul Smart

Laura Moriarty started down the artistic road she's been traveling for the last decade and more on a hunch. Originally from Beacon, the current Hudson Valley art center du jour, she was working as a papermaking apprentice at Women's Studio Workshop in Rosendale when she started wanting something more from the work she was making. The paper pieces she had learned to construct seemed trapped behind glass when exhibited, and yet Moriarty knew that she needed something to protect her medium's fragility. So she decided to try submerging her pieces in wax. "I was making prints on handmade paper but wanted the work to have more physical heft," she says in her half matter-of-fact, half amused-at-the-discovery way. "At the same time, I didn't want any unnecessary barriers between the viewer and the art."

In other words, she goes on, Moriarty - like so many artists today (and especially in the Hudson Valley) - wanted "more objectness, more physicality" to her art. "Little by little I got more and more interested in wax," she says of the encaustics medium that now subsumes so much of her working and creative life.

Moriarty is currently part of the "B5: Five Artists from Beacon" exhibit at the Kleinert/James Arts Center in Woodstock, a five-year anniversary group show at Elisa Pritzker's Casa del Arte in Highland, the "Thinking Objects" exhibit at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in New Paltz and a group show at the Katonah Museum in Westchester County. She's also involved with R & F Encaustics in midtown Kingston, curating its gallery space and helping with workshops, and teaching art classes in numerous schools around the country. She's got solo and group shows lined up through the coming year, along with a regular batch of artist's residencies and new teaching gigs.

"I live like a graduate student," she says when asked about the flow of income from actual art sales - which aren't as regular, at this point, as the grants and other opportunities that Moriarty utilizes to explore her medium and grow her art. "But I'm a good businessperson, in art terms. I keep my work out there...I just feel the work just keeps gaining strength, and that as long as I stay healthy, it'll all work out well in the end."

For those who aren't familiar with what Laura Moriarty does, either from her many shows in the area or her year-long stint as artist-in-residence at Collaborative Concepts in Beacon, it's singular and fun, yet meticulous and sublimely thoughtful. At first, she was known for large prints and maplike paintings, very natural-feeling and delicately poised between the decorative and surreal. But in recent years she's grown more three-dimensional and, along the way, conceptual. She creates geological forms, beautifully colored wax swirls that she then presents like scientific objects. Think Damien Hirst with a deeper appreciation for the odd beauty of life, and less of a need to impress everyone with his brittle intelligence.

Last summer, Moriarty created a fake archaeologist's field station in the woods at Byrdcliffe, Woodstock's century-old artists colony. For the new show at the Kleinert, she's showing a new series of just-finished "poured paintings" - fossil-like sheets displayed like found (and treasured) relics - and a giant print. The work is complex and provocative, enjoyable and yet mysterious - like all the best art can offer. She's calling the new stuff "Fossils of Imagined Territories."

"My work explores the blurred, ambiguous character of borders and boundaries. I am intrigued by tensions that exist at the edges, be they physical or political, organic or imposed. I think about the layered encaustic paintings I make as sites for exploration, excavating and compressing the warm, pigmented wax into forms that resemble weird agates, geodes, bones and shards," Moriarty notes in her latest artistic statement. "While literally pushing (rolling, folding, fracturing and clumping) the boundaries of abstract painting, this process is a play on plate tectonics, where everything is continually drifting apart and crashing together, layering one episode on top of another. Geologists know that rocks can tell stories if you know how to read them. I follow a similar curiosity-driven path, drawing far-fetched parallels between my work and the way that scientists collect, classify and display fragments lifted out of time."

The artist explains how she got the new work. It started with an attempt to create a terrarium of layered encaustic "fossil" sheets whose striations could be seen from the side. She tried matching her plan by pouring encaustic wax in layers - "an attempt to escape the tennis elbow I was afraid of getting from the intense scraping I do to get my other effects" - and switched gears in midstream when she found that "the pouring itself was really cool."

"The more I've been doing it, the more I've become aware of it all as a form of painting," Moriarty says of her latest process. "I've been experimenting with how I stir the paints, how I pour." She adds that she fills the long periods of time involved in making her art - the actual tedium of process that all artists must not only entertain, but learn to control and relish - thinking about the forms she's emulating: fossils.

"I'm seeing what I do as part of the larger Enlightenment Project," she says, rolling the last 500 or so years of scientific inquiry and modern thought into a convenient, say, ball of wax. She notes how fossils, by their very existence, are an argument for evolution, talks about "the big fight" between intellectualism and dogmatism, between curiosity and fear, as it were. But then we veer back towards an earlier discussion, away from the recently controversial subjects we've stepped into. What does Moriarty's or any art mean? How fully formed must the ideas behind visual expression be to have emotional meaning and a true aesthetic effect?

"Because I don't come from an art school, I don't try to figure out what my art means. I just make things," Moriarty says at the start of that conversation. "When I started, people were saying my work reminded them of maps when I was just thinking I was making spots on paper. So then I looked into what maps are, and became more conscious of what I was doing...yet I always tried to steer clear of letting my work be too idea-driven...I intentionally make the work less clean, less tied to the ideas I may have started from, so I can retain the amount of fun I have just making things."

Later, she sums it up succinctly: "So many fine art schools teach artists to always show how smart they are, to do tricks for the critics," she says. "I want to come from a place that's more honest." Is that something she shares with other artists in the area? I ask. "I look at the other artists in the B5 show, or in other group exhibits I'm part of in the Hudson Valley," Moriarty answers, "and I see us all as serious about what we're doing...yet still pretty spry."

In other words, what Moriarty and her work comes off as - curious, pleasantly amused and yet matter-of-fact - is not only what she is, but what our art in the Valley these days may be all about. It may even be the future of where all our art may be leading - and needs to go for us all to survive.