Portfolio: Laura Moriarty

by Beth E. Wilson, April 29, 2008

Born and raised in Beacon, Laura Moriarty’s art has developed through her own, unique process as well. Not one to follow a well-worn path, early on she sensed that academic training would not accommodate her needs. She became an artist through an internship at Women’s Studio Workshop and tremendous dedication to her work. Starting as a paper- and printmaker, she moved into using encaustic (wax-based paint), developing most recently a unique body of work that builds up strange, colorfully striated forms that strain the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Thinking through categories provided by natural science—plate tectonics, geological processes, even the systematic mapping of archeological sites—Moriarty’s latest installations sprawl into enormous accretions of encaustic, reminiscent of fairy grottos or perhaps magical coral reefs.

Moriarty is busy these days, exhibiting in this month’s SiteLines art fair invitational exhibition, participating in a show at the Oberpfalzer Kunstlerhaus in Schwandorf, Germany, and building a new studio, funded through a prestigious Pollock-Krasner Grant that she received last year. In addition to all that, she’s the Gallery Director for R&F Handmade Paints, organizing one of the more innovative exhibition programs in the area.

On not going to art school
I wanted to go [to art school] at first, but I didn’t have much money, so I went to community college, and I was very turned off right away. Even at that level, it’s for people who have been groomed, to a certain degree. Everybody else is weeded out, and not encouraged. The head of the department told me that I should be a lawyer. There really wasn’t much more you could say to offend me. Can I have my money back, please?

I decided the best way to learn is to get out there and do it. So I sought out artists, rather than schools. I didn’t think I would learn in school. Almost all my artist friends have MFAs—I don’t think less of them because of that, but I have to say there’s a certain thing there that I just would never accept [for myself]. I’m very idealistic about that.