Laura Jacobs

Artist Statement

I have been practising as an artist throughout my life in a variety of disciplines; this is my passion, and the root to everything I do and believe in.

I am interested in the interplay between photography, film, drawing and painting, and how they impact and influence each other.

I have explored film by animating my photographs with slow cross dissolves and am particularly drawn to the new imagery created during these cross dissolves; a dreamy, nostalgic reverie, fading in and out of focus and reality, the disappearance, absence and reappearance of the figure. Light is pivotal in the work as it is historically in painting, photography and film. The work has a physical, real exterior space and a psychological interior space

In Viewer Viewed Series 1 various facets of the self are captured within the tension and return of the ‘gaze’. I was concerned with the viewer as both the artist and the muse. I am the viewer and the viewed, the artist and the muse, the voyeur…. being watched, caught, seen? Who has the power, the viewer or the viewed? Who is looking at whom? A series of drawings, studies and large paintings were developed from extensive research and photographs to suggest sensuality and atmosphere. The use of dramatic lighting has come from filmic influences and my passion for paintings by Old Masters such as Velasquez and Goya.

In my recent work, Viewer Viewed Series 2, I take these ideas further by exploring viewing/representing/posing as parts of a dramatic scenario, which then becomes the main theme in the image. I take fragments from my photographs and work from them using different media and scale, producing a new series of paintings and photographic prints. This changes the context and makes the image unfamiliar again. The narrative is reinvented through this process of veiling and abstraction.