Born: 1980. Wegberg, Germany. British
Studied: Central Saint Martins School of Art & Design, London. Middlesex University, London
Laura New is an Artist and Illustrator working in a variety of mediums but very much favouring draughtsmanship and drawing in ink on paper or panel. Since 2016 Laura has been working on a series of storybook scenes of fantastical creatures that hint at macabre fables:
“Whilst reading the very first edition of Grimm’s Fairy Tales from 1812 in which the stories are without embellishment and have tragic, grotesque and gruesome endings, I began a series of drawings of storybook scenes where the visual elements exist before the tale. 'Hairy Tales' are a series of drawings of sometimes monstrous creatures woven into portrait snapshots or of bygone eras.
Fantastical beasts, contemporary cultural references, Jurassic pets, circus freaks and nostalgic children's toys thrown together to create static snapshot narratives that hint at moralistic fables amidst chaos and total nonsense.
'Hairy Tales' are a bit lost. Their stories are incomplete or don’t exist at all, woven into family portraiture of the past or stuck in a nonsensical part of their story. Some are silly, and others are twisted with nostalgia. As with the original tales that the brothers Grimm collected, they are meant for adults but retain a childlike simplicity that rolls out to reveal darker details that are a little uncomfortable.
It’s become an obsession to tinker with the narration of the characters I create and as they grow in number, I am able to introduce them to each other by way of digital collage creating bigger landscapes of narrative. I’ve begun to add story as a secondary aspect, feeding off the visual rather than the other way around and I am also working on a way in which the viewer can meddle with the story themselves. ”
Prior to the obsession of character creation in her work, Laura completed a series of portraits that were shown in exhibitions in the UK as well as forming part of a collaboration project about femininity and identity in Sao La Gallery in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam and the LPM Gallery in Texas, USA. Three of this portrait series were also shown in the exhibition 'Face Value' curated by Kathleen Soriano alongside work by Chris Levine, Paul Benney, Stephen Chambers RA, Eileen Cooper RA, Sadie Lee and Tai Shan Schierenberg.
Laura is also a regular participant at the prestigious Art Car Boot Fair www.artcarbootfair.com run by Karen Ashton and alongside artists such as Geraldine Swayne, Gavin Turk, Sir Peter Blake, Bob & Roberta Smith, Mat Collishaw, Polly Morgan and Rachel Howard.
For further information, please click on the links below:
Interview by Roshan Langley for Sweet 'Art