MFA, University of Bergen, 2020
Laura Gaiger makes paintings that hold the texture of inner life. Guided by Gaston Bachelard's poetics of space and a deep sensitivity to the collective unconscious, her work opens up the domestic as a site of resonance - intimate, symbolic, and emotionally attuned. She paints the places memory lives. Where feeling is stored. Where meaning gathers slowly. Her practice moves between large-scale installations and smaller works in oil and woodcut. Gaiger studied at The Glasgow School of Art and the University of Bergen and teaches painting, fresco, and colour theory at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Bergen.
Laura Gaiger makes paintings and installations to explore the image of the landscape and its role in politics and culture. The focus is often on using painting to propose a revised cultural image of the landscape, composing scenes which give alternatives to the conventional framing of nature. Her works pervert the tropes of painting and visual culture which have (mis-)shaped our collective memory of the land, interspersing them with personal imaginings of human-landscape relations past, present and future.
