Portals | Laura Stack

Laura Stack presents Portals, ink painting collages, and digital composite prints. Her images allude to fictional organisms and biomes and play with the tension between a natural and synthetic world. She envisions otherworldly life forms existing in an alternate reality with its own physical laws. These primordial landscapes can be experienced as microscopic, macroscopic, internal, or external. A love of science, science fiction, and experiences in nature inform Stack's artwork, as do the beautiful freaks of nature, such as fungi, microfauna, agates, and invertebrates. One can view the Portal images as an organic object and a window into another dimension. They are temporal representations of imagined biological phenomena.  

Stack's art practice moves between control and improvisation. She begins with an ink drawing of a natural form and coaxes the wet material across the paper surface, corralling and encouraging its direction. She disrupts this field of floating nebulae with painted striped forms. Shapes are then cut out and collaged, creating unworldly abstractions.

Image: Portal #5 (detail) 2023, Ink collage, gouache on paper on panel, 30" x 24"