Using only her memory and a hyper-vivid imagination, Laura Footes paints intuitively when conjuring complex, dreamy scenes from her life. There are no photographic source materials or preliminary sketches when working in the studio; instead, she relies on the raw emotions and mental images that spring forth when recalling her past. The artist’s paintings are rendered fluidly in oil paint to depict extremely personal spaces and scenes, all smartly softened and blurred to let viewers enter her life and mind.

The notion of escape and release is a constant theme for Footes, which is not surprising, given she has experienced chronic illness since childhood, along with the psychological tolls it has spurred along the way. But what is unexpected is how poetic these remembrances and moments of anamnesis become in her painterly hands. A sense of catharsis and euphoria pervades as her painted figures come undone, sometimes turning to mist or fading into ghostly silhouettes. The recurring desire to leave the body in pursuit of more poetic expanses feels like a universal thought, but one that is very unique to witness contextualized through art.

In the painting, Young Insomniac, a figure is seated alone on a bed, cast in strong directional light. As illumination turns to shadow, they melt and meld into the painting behind them, reforming as a nude woman running into the woods, like a nymph. In a clever twist, the inverse of this strange scene is presented in another canvas, Young Insomniac II, featuring a hovering rectangle that frames the backside of the same individual. But now, we are inside the painting, watching as their body unfurls into otherworldly vapor and then comes together as the same woman dashing off into the forest, but here in multiple frames that burst with cinematic flair.

Life as a full-time artist came unexpectedly to Footes, who was supporting herself as a housemaid in the UK until recently. There were many moments of convalescence back then, as there still are today, spent obsessively drawing in bed. Laura slowly became comfortable with sharing her drawings and other works on social media, and then one day, out of the blue, Dame Tracey Emin spotted her posts, and the rest was history, as they say. 

Laura Footes (b.1988, Birmingham, UK) lives and works in Margate, UK, and holds a BA in Modern Languages and Art History from The Sorbonne. She studied drawing at The Royal Drawing School in their post-graduate program and was a resident at The Art Students League in New York. Laura was the first Tracey Emin Fellow to be mentored independently following residency at TKE Studios, and she has had solo exhibitions at Carl Freedman Gallery (Margate, UK), SHRINE (New York, NY), Pushkin House (London, UK), and Flowers Gallery (London, UK).