ABOUT THE ARTIST
Laura Thipphawong is a Toronto-based artist, writer, and historian, and has exhibited art and presented her research throughout several galleries and international academic forums. A self-taught oil painter since the age of twelve, Laura made her way from small-town northern Ontario to Toronto to pursue a career in the arts. She won the 2016 medal from OCAD University with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual and Critical Studies, before attending the University of Toronto where she earned a Master of Arts in Art History.
Her studio practice represents her interdisciplinary research on aesthetics and cultural symbolism with focus on sexuality, horror, folklore, and the history of science.
Through the exploration of psychological elements within folkloric narratives and archetypes I seek to discover meaning in the complex and ambiguous relationship between the self and the Other. The academic observation and reinterpretation of these relationships means having to reconcile oppositional materials in my research, and then evoking the feelings of unsettlement and inner conflict in my art.
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 ecstatic, and that the obscurity of the psyche remains the most fascinating subject. For this reason, along with a morbid curiosity for the esoteric, I am intent on investigating the liminal space that exists between the (false) dichotomies good and evil, predator and prey, and beauty and the grotesque.