Laura Winn Clark
Between a Sock and a Hard Place
Oil on linen
2023
Where do we find the wherewithal to make art? The American Heritage dictionary defines wherewithal as “The necessary means, especially financial means.” There is desperation in the word: an onomatopoeic wail. If savings is the ability to impose on others, then how – amid obligations – do we claim the time, space and energy?
“You say, ‘Hello’ and I say, ‘How are you?’ And then you ‘confess’ to a terrible morning and we feel better that we got past ‘pleasantries.’ But we didn’t talk about what caused you to get up this morning, forego more lucrative work and more pleasurable leisure to MAKE something.”
Laura Clark’s realistic oil paintings, featuring friends and acquaintances in the creative act, challenge preferred narratives of women in popular culture. The unique story of each subject motivates compositional juxtapositions and bold color. The intimate scale of many works beckons the viewer close; other times, the work invites the audience to embody someone in the subject’s life, complicating their viewership.
Entering each subject’s world through conversation, documentation and reflection, the artist aims to locate the messy forces that govern women’s lives. Her process creates an opportunity to ask meaningful questions, unearth esoteric wisdom, and share the ways women privately negotiate their roles, responsibilities, identities and relationships. Slow thinking and uncertainty are important; the themes are existential: commitment, shirking, isolation, connection and agency.
In another series, Clark renders urban backyards, where all – from the walls and patios to the trees and plants – are the result of generations of careful toil. Fascinated by the investment in these spaces and the complexities of how these spaces operate, the implicit subjects are the women who construct and curate them, the time they devote to it and the parallel care she takes in mythologizing their Sisyphean efforts.
Laura Clark received her BA from Princeton University in Architecture and Urban Planning, then worked as a documentary producer. She was an artist-in-residence at Kunstraum, LLC and a 2022 Mother Art Prize finalist.
