Taking poetic license with geology, Laura Moriarty compares the processes of the studio with processes of the earth. The forms, colors, textures and patterns of her sculptural paintings result from forces similar to those that shape and reshape the earth: heating and cooling, erosion, subduction, friction, enfolding, weathering and slippage. Layers of color form the strata of a methodology in which the immediacy of the hand can translate a sense of deep time. Working and reworking molten, richly pigmented beeswax, Laura builds each object through a slow, simple yet strenuous physical engagement, which often becomes a metaphor for the ephemerality of life and civilization. Laura has also developed encaustic monotypes as an ongoing by-product of her three-dimensional work. Like the translucent sections used in optical mineralogy, they are the thinnest possible slivers of her work and another way of capturing time.

At WSW, Laura worked as an apprentice papermaker from 1986 to 1990. She has since returned to WSW to work in the studios as an artist-in-residence several times. Her work has been supported by two Pollock-Krasner grants, a New York Foundation for the Arts MARK Award, and residencies across the U.S. Laura lives and works in the Hudson Valley, exhibiting her work extensively.

Images (left to right below):
Churches, 4 & 5, pigmented beeswax, black sand, powdered charcoal, soot; Horizons, 2, encaustic monotype; Horizons, 4, encaustic monotype; Normal Faults, pigmented beeswax