Private: Laura Madera

“I use painting to poetically explore the natural world, it’s primal energies, and to approximate something of the wonder of it. I think about this subjective investigation in relation to the multiplicity of places surrounding me but also to the world within.

A painting, or series of paintings, begins with asking questions.

The painting that follows is the result of negotiating, probing, and conversing within a process of making. For me this is an unpredictable shifting process of understanding and coming-into-being that can only be arrived at through a physical engagement with materials and landscape.

Images for my paintings stem from direct experience of my regional practice in Peterborough Ontario. Content is something previously seen, thought, felt, dreamed of, which is then reconstructed or reimagined through my studio processes. My desire for these images to become paintings develops over time, slowly. Out of a need to explore the edges and dimensions of the subject and feeling – a way to grasp in paint the seemingly ungraspable.

Using the medium of watercolour, I am interested in innovating contemporary Canadian painting. I routinely challenge common assumptions of watercolour and its genres. For instance, I shift dainty botanical watercolour into the scale of a three-story sixty-foot public art installation. I use uncommon methods and materials such as latex in the creation of my watercolours as a means to make, preserve, protect and ultimately reveal light. I have developed a unique fresco surface that allows me to paint watercolour directly on panel and exhibit them without glass – foregrounding their intense atmospheric and evocative properties. My work is exhibited nationally and internationally in both public and private galleries. Most recently, in “Willing the Season” a virtual exhibition in New York City organized by Far x Wide.” – Laura Madera

Laura Madera received her BFA from Emily Carr University, BC and an MFA from the University of Guelph, ON. Her practice explores the potential of watercolour as a means to poetically investigate phenomena within a contemporary context. Her work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Far x Wide in New York NY, Robert McLaughlin Gallery (RMG) in Oshawa ON, Monastiraki in Montreal QC and is held in private collections across Canada, the United States and Mexico. She was named as one of Canada’s most promising emerging painters by the Magenta Foundation. Currently, she is a recipient of an Artist Production grant from the Ontario Arts Council. Her studio is located in Peterborough on the Treaty 20 and traditional territory of the Mississauga Anishinaabeg.