Laurie Larson is a Salt Lake City based artist focused on topics in design and biology. Currently pursuing her Master of Architecture at the University of Utah, Laurie has shifted focus from the animation and media arts she studied in her undergraduate career to focus on the built environment. She aims to pull this education into her artistic practice and hopes to contribute to work being done in empathetic, resilient, sustainable, and humble design. Resonating with the New Materialists and work being done in Biodesign, Laurie is motivated by the fit and shape of designed objects with human and non-human bodies. Laurie orients her aesthetic sensibilities around her own biophilia/phobia and is interested in motifs and forms that express the beauty of organisms, the self-organization of material, and the tremendous horror of organic matter.
Artist Statement: "Chair No. 2 is a desire object gleaned from the hyperactivity I feel within my body, and the spite I felt for the chair I owned in 2019. This is the second iteration of my chair design which is intended to facilitate multiple ways of sitting so that I can move between positions frequently. The chair is designed to visually echo bodies; looking all at once to be dendriform, animal-like, and fungal. The look of this chair and the time and methods required for its construction are deeply antithetical to the chair I owned in 2019, which was injection-formed from bright green plastic. It has scars from it’s violent, rapid, and demanding manufacturing process. It has an orange-peel texture. It curves and cups at ninety degrees: its form is willing to hold, but only in the form of sitting. So stern in it’s function, the object disconnects me from my body. Chair No. 2 is ambiguous. Formed from Maple’s body and my time to be delicate and biological.
Bodies are temporary boundaries: matter organizing itself into a creature that slowly drifts into something else. Dune Fruit is about boundaries, iterations, drift: how liveliness in matter propels itself forwards, and the essential tools that have developed wholistically throughout life in order to form creatures."
