BIOGRAPHY
LAURA LOWE (b.1991) — is a young Finnish painter with an alchemically inspired artistic practice. Her work explores structural colours, which emerge from the refraction of light — like in Newton’s prism. This immaterial colour is the result of hundreds of trials in the laboratory, manipulating painting mediums into behaving like thin-film nanostructures.
A recent graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki, Lowe’s MFA degree show won the Anita Snellman Award and was shortlisted in the Global Design Graduate Show ‘23 competition. She is currently working on her first public artwork, which won the Hotel GLO Art competition and her first post-graduation shows. Lowe has been invited to the Ars Bioarctica residency ‘25 at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in the Arctic.
ARTIST STATEMENT
THE STRUCTURAL COLOUR PAINTINGS were born from observations of the Hanasaari coal power plant, which is visible from the artist’s studio window. The series examines how the rainbow phenomenon found in coal seams and oil slicks captures a Lovecraftian anxiety over the turbulent changes happening in our world.
I am interested in the structural colour’s ability to create metamorphic paintings, which change in response to their surroundings. These ‘living and dying paintings’ react to stimuli from their environment: the changing light, moving shadows, and reflected shapes and colours. Colour bursts into life in a Lazarus transformation as the viewer walks past. The mirror-like surface draws the observer into becoming an active participant in the kaleidoscopic event taking place on the canvas. My work reflects on how our fate is ultimately intertwined with the changes happening in the environment.
CONTACT
Laura Lowe Studio
Nilsiänkatu 10B, Helsinki
FI-00510
@lauralowestudio
lauralowestudio [at] gmail.com
