About Laura
My journey into the creative world began long before I really thought of myself as an artist. At school, I loved art and explored video art for my HSC, creating a final work titled Hold Your Breath, which was selected for ARTEXPRESS and exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW. Not long afterwards, a digital camera given to me by my parents for Christmas sparked an interest in photography that has stayed with me ever since.
Finding beauty in the overlooked
What I love most about photography is giving new life to the ordinary things we pass every day. Through a camera, something as simple as a bicycle spoke, an unusual shadow or a tiny green plant emerging from a pile of dead leaves can become worthy of a second look. My subjects move between urban landscapes, nature, animals and the small, easily missed details of everyday life.
For me, though, photography has never just been about the finished photograph. There is something therapeutic about heading out with my camera bag, slowing down and becoming completely absorbed in looking at the world around me. Some of my favourite days involve choosing somewhere to explore, packing my camera and lunch, and simply seeing what I find.
Over time, that need to create has found its way into other forms too.
Writing what I can't always say
Writing, particularly poetry, has become another way for me to make sense of life and put words around experiences that can be difficult to explain. My work explores vulnerability, mental health, faith, resilience, uncertainty and the complicated business of being human.
In many ways, my writing and photography have naturally grown towards one another. My upcoming poetry and photography book, The Ache of Becoming, brings the two together, pairing my original poems with my photographs to explore the difficult, beautiful and often unfinished process of becoming.
Writing with fire
More recently, I discovered pyrography — literally, writing with fire — and found myself hooked. I am largely self-taught, learning through experimentation, plenty of practice and the occasional moment when the wood or pyrography pen has had ideas of its own.
There is something incredibly satisfying about taking a piece from an idea, through the design process, and finally burning it by hand into wood. I particularly love creating personalised pieces, where small details about a person, relationship or story can be woven together into something that couldn't belong to anybody else.
When the different pieces came together
Eventually, I began wondering what might happen if these different parts of my creativity weren't kept separate.
My Comfort Bundles grew from that question and from my own experience of how powerful a tangible object can be during a difficult season. They bring together my poetry, photography and hand-burnt work to create meaningful gifts for those times when somebody desperately wants to say “I see you. I care. I'm here,” but words on their own don't seem quite enough.
The first collections, Seeds of Trust and Golden Mending, explore uncertainty, faith, hurt, rebuilding and the idea that neither growth nor healing needs to happen according to a timetable.
Still becoming
Photography, poetry and pyrography might look like very different creative practices, but to me they come from much the same place: noticing something, sitting with it, and finding a way to give it form.
Sometimes that becomes a photograph. Sometimes a poem. Sometimes it's burned permanently into a piece of wood.
And sometimes, wonderfully, it's all three.