Up Pompeii

Overview

Laura Williams was born in 1965 in Palmerston North. She has always painted but became fully immersed in the art world in 2010 when she began to paint and draw in earnest. Despite some community art classes in the 1980’s, she is self-taught. She has always painted items that she has collected throughout her life such as pictures from magazines, books, bric-a-brac, ceramics, wallpaper, pictures and fabric, and says that the resulting art is the visual expression of her cultural capital.

“My paintings are nearly all still life or of domestic interiors, you could say they are interior monologues… Lately I have started to include images from my favourite painters and illustrators in my idealized habitats. All my heroes are equal in my pictures: Alcorn resides next to Illingworth, classical Greek art rubs shoulders with recruitment posters and modern masters are consigned to banal suburban settings.” Her works have been described as an “intricate web of signs and symbols, textures and colour”.

Her first exhibition was in August 2013 at the Kriesler Gallery in Brunswick, Melbourne Australia, which came about as a result of Nick Kreisler seeing her paintings on Facebook. Since then she has had three more successful exhibitions at the Black Asterisk Gallery, at the Outsider Art Fair and the Lesley Kriesler Gallery, New Plymouth.