Laura Findlay: Moving While Looking at Things That Do Not Move

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Laura Findlay, Moving While Looking at Things That Do Not Move (detail)," 2016

gesso on found object

Opening Reception // Saturday, January 14, 6:30 to 8:00 pm

Artist's Talk with Laura Findlay // Saturday, February 18 at 1:00 pm All ages, FREE

Join artist Laura Findlay in our studios to learn more about her research and painting practice. Findlay’s exhibition in The Cube, Moving While Looking at Things That Do Not Move, includes an array of objects with cylindrical imagery and textures meant to be observed from all sides, revealing the static but shifting landscape of vessels. 

Through these works, Findlay questions the current role of history painting through notions of narrative, empathy and the sublime. Following her talk, Laura Findlay will lead a hands-on workshop in our studios

Laura Findlay is based in Toronto, Ontario, and has worked as a sessional instructor in the Faculty of Visual Arts at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. The body of work developed for this exhibition emerged from research over the past year and her time living and working in Kamloops.

The title for the exhibition emerges from the writing of Scottish author Nan Shepherd (1893-1981) and her book The Living Mountain. In it, Shepherd champions a prolonged and contemplative experience of the landscape, foregoing a hurried ascent to a mountain peak in favour of savouring the expanse of the plateau. To better understand the relatively static geologic landscape Shepherd appeals that “moving the eye itself when looking at things that do not move, deepens one’s sense of outer reality.” 

Findlay’s project questions the current role of history painting through notions of narrative, empathy and the sublime. Her recent work examines historical events from fragments of evidence, re-examining the past through landscapes of dormant volcanoes. Having researched environments such as Volcanoes National Park in Hawai’i and Wells Grey Provincial Park north of Kamloops, the artist collected documents, images and data of historical and current geologic records. This exhibition includes an array of objects with cylindrical imagery and textures meant to be observed from all sides, revealing the static but shifting landscape of vessels. Her altered ceramic vessels reference the fragments of human presence found in volcanic eruption sites while documenting the landscapes on their surface. 

Findlay’s sculptural objects play off of static painted depictions on the wall of The Cube, shifting focus between object and image, natural and human-made landscapes. The works move in relation to each other much like viewing a hierarchy of mountain range and landscape slowly hiding and emerging new views as one moves through the space, hinting at clues gained and lost to history, both geological and human. 

Curated by Craig Willms, Assistant Curator, Kamloops Art Gallery.