Laura Porath

Laura Porath is fascinated with nature, the bizarre, and all things humorous. Her work is primarily figurative stone sculpture and abstract paintings. Laura's shift to contemporary art began with an art class at the University of Manitoba that she took as a stepping stone to take her life in a different direction. Instantly she was hooked; before she knew it, she had finished an honours degree with a thesis in sculpture. 

Laura approaches sculpting as a conversation with the stone. She seeks out the material's potential to find what the stone has to offer and how she can work with it to create a powerful and evocative piece. Laura likes to work with strong symbolism to enhance the narrative for the viewer. She has always had a compulsive urge to give inanimate objects anthropomorphic features and is obsessed with hybrids of any kind. Combining elements that aren’t typically paired together has also always interested her, hence the hybrid obsession; you can find this in both her sculptures and her paintings.  

When she creates her paintings, the aim is for them to be pleasing and unexpected to the eye. Laura attempts this with colour, form, movement, and illusion of light. She is always up for trying something new, whether it is in art or in any facet of life. With her paintings she is always experimenting. Life is full of routine which makes time pass quicker and feels boring and redundant -- trying something new is exciting and gets her dopamine flowing. It also makes time feel like it is passing slower, allowing her to enjoy every moment of life a little bit more. 

Her urge to create comes out in every aspect of her life. It can be satisfied simply by building a stretcher for a painting or cooking a beautiful meal from scratch. It is the need to create that gives Laura passion for life.

She strives to create art that will stop the viewer in their tracks either by the visual strength or the powerful imagery of the piece. In this increasingly busy and content saturated world, Laura wants to captivate and encourage wonder and contemplation.