Etudes (2014-20)

etude (noun); a short musical composition, typically for one instrument, designed as an exercise to improve the technique or demonstrate the skill of the player. Origin: mid 19th century from French, literally, ‘study’.

Between larger serial based projects, Laura takes refuge in these small, technical pieces or etudes as she has come to think of them. The subjects are often closer to home and draw on her love of flowers, vessels, the domestic interior and painting itself. They are also the means with which she can attend to and indulge her passion for the formal qualities of painting, namely colour, tone, mark-making and proportion. Not deliberately, but definitely consistently, Laura draws on the diptych as a means of creating a viewfinder (or armature) to frame the main subject and open it out to the more abstract forces governing perception and our relationship to sight.