ABOUT THE ARTIST
Laura Thipphawong is an artist, writer, and historian, and has exhibited art and presented her research throughout several galleries and international academic forums. Laura made her way from a small town in northern Ontario to Toronto to pursue a career in the arts, and now holds a medal and a Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Critical studies from OCAD University, and a Master of Arts in Art History from the University of Toronto. Her studio practice in oil painting and drawing is representative of her research on the complex narrative symbolism of the psyche in response to various social and emotional factors, with focus on sexuality, horror, folklore, literature, and natural science.
Laura’s work has been featured in several galleries, exhibition spaces, and publications such as CBC Arts, New Visionary Magazine, the Lieutenant Governor’s Suite in Toronto, and the National Gallery of Canada.
I seek to discover meaning in the complex and ambiguous relationship between the self and the other by exploring and reinterpreting psychological elements within folkloric narratives and archetypes. By treating my images and series of works as a chance to tell stories about the mind and emotions, I delve deep into art history and collective narratives while applying a singular and esoteric lens to the visual construction, and so my work is both deeply personal and strangely universal.
The academic scrutiny and symbolic representation of emotional experience in my work means having to reconcile oppositional materials, and then evoking the feelings of unsettlement and inner conflict. While we are comfortable to separate our personal reality from that which threatens us, no one is a spectator of humanity, and no one is absolved of it. I believe that personal evolution and emotional unrest are the truest aspects of humanity, however terrifying, and that the obscurity of the psyche remains the most fascinating artistic subject. For this reason, I am intent on searching the areas that hinge between the false dichotomies of good and evil, predator and prey, and beauty and the grotesque.