Laura Olohan

About

Laura Olohan is a Welsh artist based in London, and is currently on the MA Painting course at RCA.

“My painting practice is an attempt to portray absence and its presence within the everyday.

Painted with laborious details of lines adds an intensity and a psychological charge to what could be seen as mundane. They become both minimal in appearance yet are overloaded with information on closer inspection.

The muted images I paint play with something on the edge of visibility and it is also their relationship to transient elements; smoke, mist, fog and memory that is of interest. The idea of the trace, that what is seen emerges through what is not is important to me. In my work I don’t try to capture people, I try to mark their having been. The lines in my paintings accumulate like the echo of their footsteps. A bruise fades into the sky, a ghostly figure stands alone in the distance, a traffic cone has been knocked over..

The maze or labyrinths that are incorporated into the everyday scenes are not only symbolic of the psychological navigation of grief in everyday life, but also the feelings of being lost and trying to find a way out. The shape and contours of a labyrinth emerge from underneath the surface  as if there are connections to a network of roots, vibrations, wires or nerves.

The painted bruise image as a backdrop to these subtle scenes emphasises not only suffering and pain, but enhances the visible and the unseen; bruises also fade and disappear.

I want my paintings to act as memories – both ephemeral and fragile, yet at times vivid and all too present.”