Artist Statement

Kally Laurence

 

 I am about the everyday, its immediate and instantaneous beauty and the bigger social and sentimental feelings an everyday object or event can evoke. It is about noticing, enjoying and celebrating the mundane objects, social interactions and scenes of the everyday that are relatable to and form the bulk of our existence, and therefore the important ones - not so much the grand events in life . I am all about looking and observing what’s around me. The aim of the work is to capture the beauty of a moment through the representation of everyday objects, observed patterns and colour, scenes and people, and then to instigate questions and memories of a bigger issue. They are depicting moments that are both personal and shared experiences. The work isn’t supposed to be idealistic or dictatorial.

 

 We are all naturally drawn to different objects or scenes that come to us on a daily basis. Having worked in the world of fashion and textiles I find myself drawn to pattern within daily life - a bus seat pattern in India, (India will always occupy a place in my heart ) or on a train to Southend, mismatched fabric seat covers in a bar in Greece. I am often inspired by and draw upon social issues or objects that relate to that which are going on in my personal life. A life that is changing with the passage of time. 

 

 My interest lies  in how we see the same familiar objects and environments in a different way depending on how we are feeling, how present we are and what else is going on in our lives,  like rewatching a film -  noticing different details each time and feeling quite differently towards certain characters or plots, depending on where we are in our own lives. As well as experiencing and being reawakened to a familiar environment differently when it’s covered in snow or blossom for example.

 

 In my most recent work I have gone back to my roots as a printmaker and have engaged in making large scale monotypes, using a combination of screen print, block print and painting. I studied printmaking at the Royal College of Art . I want the work to be beautiful but at the same time hold an energy and spontaneity. I love the making - the processes and the physical actions and experiments of layering and deleting elements, over painting and playing with colour and density. I have an Indian bazaar approach to life and my work  and enjoy adding more and more to a work to tell my ongoing story. I am really interested in the hands of the maker and the tools of the trade, often using either my hands or a screen printing squeegee to apply the paint.The making of the work is a very physical process. Over the years I have created a language of mark making that both tells the story and celebrates the materials and substance and processes of painting and printmaking.

 

 I enjoy external forces drawing me to a subject matter that the world has delivered to me, and the moment when the visual language and materials come together to create the magic that I felt at the point of time and the place it is depicting. When a work says this back to me I declare it to be finished.