The work Laura has been making in Rome during a nine month residency, having been awarded the Ampersand Foundation Fellowship at the British School at Rome, has been focused around food – the making of dough sculpture, responding to an artisan food culture. She has become particularly fascinated with the processes, display methods and experience of eating food. She has been learning food processes such as handmade pasta and pizza techniques through the eyes and hands of food experts, and cooking with food writers and artist from other academies, all of which gets digested and absorbed into her studio and writing practice.
Laura has been making pasta for eating as well as manipulating dough to make sculpture. She is focused on the experience of her body in relation to these materials and activities. Using her entire body, small intimate actions to make pasta to eat, and her entire body to stretch and form the dough into unruly sculptures. Her works reflect a visceral experience of inside and outside the body (human and animal), each part caught in motion, between the fluid and the stable.
Laura also has a long time fascination with stone. Since being in Rome her interest in this material has been reignited, such as with the sculptures of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, an artist/architect who pushed the capabilities of stone to the limits during the Renaissance period.
She is interested in the collision of different materials and their associations. Bernini was quoted to have said he was “making stone as obedient to the hand as if it were dough.” This connection between the everyday material of dough and the valuable marble of Carrara, understood to both having unique material qualities. Laura is interested in bringing these two materials into the same arena, manipulating dough beyond its familiar culinary use by shaping it into folds, twisting it like fabric while been compelled and guided by its awkward material nature, not to be controlled or fixed.