Laura Moriarty

visual art inspired by natural history        moriartylaura@gmail.com

Home   Statement   Sculptural Paintings   Works on Paper   Bio/Resume   News    Links

 

Statement

I began painting with pigmented beeswax about 12 years ago, and became interested in the range of things that I can get to happen by heating and cooling the wax. The process of heating and cooling has evolved into a way for me to draw parallels between human and geologic time. Rocks can tell the story of time if you know how to read their bands of strata. In my own comparatively smaller way, I consider painting similarly, using the process of making as a tool for discovery. In my work, process and concept merge as I consider the pure medium fodder for a re-visioning of natural history, where I get to make all the specimens in the museum.

Click here for
The Way Paintings Go   a speeded-up video that illustrates Laura Moriarty's sculptural painting process from start to finish.

My current work aims to create a textbook of geologic processes - as if each piece were a page from a reference book, illustrating cross-sections of imagined terrains. These paintings are built up thickly around embedded sculptural elements, and then excavated and eroded down to reveal what was buried. Like rockfaces or archaeological sites, their layers reveal the history of their making and can be read like the lines of a story.