Laura Moriarty - Shelf Life
Sept 24th - Oct 29th 2005

I think about the layered encaustic paintings I make as sites for exploration. Excavating their surfaces, I compress or pour the warm, pigmented wax into forms that resemble weird fossils, geodes, bones and shards. Pushing the boundaries of sculpture and painting in this way makes me think about plate tectonics, where everything is continually drifting apart and crashing together, layering one episode on top of another in eccentric ways. Geologists know that rocks can tell stories if you know how to read them; I follow a similar principle in my studio, playfully comparing human and geologic time.

My work has evolved into something that might best be described as forensic painting, or faux-archaeology. The studio is a stand-in for the laboratory, where I am constantly experimenting and chasing down clues. The gallery is where I display my results, working with subtexts that refer to the way museums collect and display artifacts. I create installations that draw curious parallels between the natural sciences and my own process-oriented compulsions, while hopefully giving viewers a new way to think about the ever-shifting world we live in.

www.lauramoriarty.com