Statement

My work explores cognition, memory, and embodied experience through a material-driven practice. I source pigments from my surroundings and process them to make paint; these are vessels for memory. The rhythmic mark-making in my paintings and works on paper carries the memory of the movement of my hand across the page or panel, the lines shifting from dark to light as the paintbrush leaves its trace. Bright or synthetic colors on grounds of earth pigment serve as beacons or signs and punctuate the rhythmic line work.

The Traveling Drawings can be folded and unfolded like old road maps as I work on them. In referencing maps, I point to the history of cartography and counter cartographies, and I reinsert memory and the body into the space of the map. The drawings begin as two stenciled lines, mirror images of one another. I slowly build the drawings, working from one side of the paper and then the other until the undulating lines join and overlap. In this meeting of the two sides, new shapes emerge, which speak to the Surrealist notion of a “third mind” or a “third memory” created in the space between an event and its retelling. The drawings display an imperfect symmetry which evokes the mutable body as it traverses time and space.

Bio

Laura Josephine Snyder (b.1983, Charlottesville, VA) is a visual artist whose work explores cognition, memory, and embodied experience through a material-driven practice. She has shown her work nationally and internationally, including in Asheville, North Carolina, Mexico City, México, and Bogotá, Colombia. In 2024-25, she had solo exhibitions at Second Street Gallery in Charlottesville, Virginia and Reynolds Gallery in Richmond, Virginia. Her work is held in numerous private and corporate collections. Snyder undertook artist residencies at JOYA AiR, Cortijada los Gázquez, Vélez Blanco, Spain in 2018 and at New City Arts Initiative in Charlottesville in 2014. She has a MFA from the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de México (UNAM) and a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.