Laura Hart Newlon
Laura Hart Newlon is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Seattle, USA.
My practice evolves out of a fascination with materiality and looking as a cultural practice. A single work often evolves through different analog and digital media, finding new possibilities through each unfolding. Research into the ambiguous cultural meanings of found images and image-making technologies guides my work in the studio. Recent research has explored the materiality of both analog and digital photography, ideas of visibility and tactility related to image-making processes, and seeing as sensual, physical act that plays out both tenderly and forcefully upon a body. Work on ArtConnect features pieces created by combining the 19th-century wet plate collodion process with digital workspaces, and Heavy Focus, a video weaving together ideas of tactility, visibility and the body, and the material conditions of image-making. Critical to this work are the ways that everyday images inform our understanding of looking and notions of visibility in contemporary culture.
Emily Zimmerman
Curator
“Laura Hart Newlon’s reflections on the forces that act upon bodies and the embodiment of images in materials constitute a rich artistic investigation in an age of endless digital reproducibility. Newlon’s enfolding of various times and spaces within a single work of art appears to invoke the Baroque in image-making, which calls to mind Deleuze’s writings in The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque. The artist’s use of historical photographic materials, as well as traditional forms of reading images such as the diptych, lends the weight of deep time to her work, while the formal interventions into these historic forms make the pieces entirely contemporary.”
ArtConnect asked the winning artists to share with us a glimpse into their creative life to get a sense of their personal inspiration and artistic process.
How did you get started as an artist?
My background is in cultural anthropology (BA and MA), but I was always interested in pictures. Sooner or later, my interest in all the wonderful strangeness of pictures outstripped everything else, and here I am.
And how would you describe your artistic approach?
Sheer dumb curiosity ... what happens if I do this? I'm interested in combining things that aren't necessarily meant to go together, and that applies. to ideas, objects, materials and processes.
Studio image Laura Hart Newlon
Clementine
Butler-Gallie
Curator
“An interplay between frame and image appears in Laura Hart Newlon’s work, which often features body parts, whether real or marbled, fashioned or raw. This play, which sees body parts multiplied or carved, alludes to an artistic inquiry into the complexities of beauty, body, and human senses. The video piece Heavy Focus offers an important insight into the artist’s research process, providing a poetic reading to an archive of influential images. The voice in the video interweaves theoretical thoughts with instructions from beauty tutorials, becoming a mantra for the intricacies of images and the bounteousness of bodies. Even with Hart Newlon’s more simple compositions, there are clearly multiple layers of thought beneath each image.”
What sources do you look to for inspiration?
Functional 'how-to' images and images out of context; engineered materials and designed objects with relationships to the body; dumb humor; being a mother.
What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced as an artist?
Being a mother and an artist at the same time. Wanting to learn how to do too many things at once.
Describe a typical day in the studio/wherever you make your work.
I don't know if there is a typical day. Though I have a core set of interests, my work varies a lot in terms of process and materials. One day I might be mixing silver nitrate and sanding glass for ambrotypes, and another I might cutting holes into pigment prints. Last year when I felt out of ideas, I made a bunch of clay knots, just to give my hands something to do.
What are you currently working on? What’s coming up next for you?
I recently started sandblasting glass in my frames (similar to glass in Yeux You piece), which I'm excited about. I've also been thinking a lot about shadows, both as a technical challenge in photographic processes, an opportunity to play with visibility, and a presence in so many cultural myths, fables and stories. I'm not sure where that research is going yet, but I'm excited about it.
Is there a medium, a process, or a technique that you haven't used in your work yet but would like to try out?
So many! I would like to learn how to weld to create armatures for images. I would also like to learn stained glass techniques to create different possibilities for how frames themselves can be integrated as more part of a photographic object.
How does it feel to be selected as an ArtConnect Artist to Watch?
I'm thinking it feels pretty good.
See more of Laura Hart Newlon’s work
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