Lyon & Turnbull | Laura Jane Hegarty
1 July 2024
We are delighted to present our 2024 Graduate Showcase Award winner, Laura Jane Hegarty. As part of the 2024 Graduate Showcase Award, Laura Jane will spend a week working at the Bothy Project on the beautiful Scottish island of Eigg. A showcase of Laura Jane's work will be exhibited in our Edinburgh saleroom in August 2025 alongside our Contemporary Art and Prints & Multiples auctions.
Laura Jane Hegarty is an interdisciplinary artist and whose work investigates a formula of light, touch, time and beauty. Considering the making and viewing of art to be felt both in-and-between sight and touch, she seeks to explore the multiplicity of sensory transference in the visual, tactile and wider sensory systems.
Looking for a personal understanding of the endless and interconnected stimuli at our fingertips, and the shared capacities for processing it all, she borrows from a broad range of academic fields, particularly philosophical theory and neuroscientific studies. Complementing this, by paying close attention to the experiencing of everyday beauty, the artist pursues a deeper understanding of the embodied feelings of phenomena: such as the tricklings of sunlight, gentle breezes and warm touches of skin; she explores the replication of these in the language of visual art. Elements of these understandings propel her cyclical practice of research, writing and making to navigate the spheres of the scholarly, the quotidian and the individual.
Laura Jane's practice questions, pushes upon and plays with conventions of artistic materialities in hopes to find something in the in-between of material properties and artistic outcomes. Her current focus on the medium of cyanotypes is an inquisitive conversation between material and artist, negotiating the interplay of sunlight and time's ephemeral quality with the lasting impression of touch: felt through the artist's hand and body.
Cyanotype on Muslin, Sunlight, Artist’s Body, 12 Hours
Laura Jane has said about Clockwork:
“Clockwork is a conversation between my own body and moments of sunlight, captured in the medium of cyanotype and time. By laying on the material for 60 minutes, repeated twelve times for each hour of the clock face, this process gave visual record to the conditions of the sunlight, my touch and my movements, and the passing of time which facilitated it’s creation. These component parts are all fleeting and ephemeral daily occurrences usually disappear from the mind and memory after a short time, but here, working in combination, they make up the materials of the work.”
Learn more about Laura Jane's work: https://www.laurajanehegarty.com/clockwork