The Portals 

Ink and graphite on paper
36 x 48 cm



Image courtsey of A.I., London, by Lucy Emms



Be here now. The didactic and sagging new age koan beleaguers, tires. This now is too much. It is hard and mean, deadly, unjust. The globe heaves under the weight of this past year’s events, and the news cycle echoes in tragic refrain. The overload of stimulation and inane horrors short the capacity to attend, particularly and most devotedly, to the heavy present.

Laura Hindmarsh’s waterscapes are both portal and destination. Lines of text drift in aimless currents of blues and blacks, prompting more aimlessness, suggesting poetry. It seems that in this placeless space, Hindmarsh offers escape as meaningful vehicle and purposed exit, as if escape were a destination unto itself. And in this time, it is. Hindmarsh’s images are screen-shaped exit-signs, pointing to a way out, at least for a while. The artist posits sea and screen as synonymous liminal environments— citizen-less, weather-less, identity-less, shape-less free zones, as soothing and hypnotic as a heartbeat. Sea and screen, holy theatres of capacious expansion, present themselves as vast and roomy halls of distilled being, opening and closing repeatedly in a tidal offering of possible other life, antidote and mirror to loneliness and overload.

Sea, swallow me.

Fly me to the moon underwater. I am here with me now, and my waking dreams are made of sky and sea. The world is in me. I carry all of its trappings and possibilities in the electric hum that orders and guides the rhythms of my pulse. It is conductor and muse, this beat.

Listen to it pound as I hold my breath.

Plunge.

Float.

The world around me blurs, but my visions are still in focus.

My body weightless buoy, the suspension of gravity a life raft, the blessed interiority and its

possibilities, an embrace.

- Text by Amy Bernstein
Amy Bernstein is an artist and writer based in Los Angeles, California.





Trigger...Trigger

Moving image performance 
digital video, scanned 16mm, super8 and pencil on paper
20 minutes

contact for screener link



‘Trigger…Trigger…’ is a moving image performance which is streamed to an audience using the format of the shared screen. The work comprises a live edit and narration of a story told through found footage, internet searches, sleep, flashbacks and the re-occurring metaphor of the Vampiric.

Taking as a starting point Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the genre of Gothic Imperialism, the work pivots around the UK seaside town of Whitby as a place which the narrator cannot get to. From there the story unfolds through associative linking of personal and public anxieties around a fear of blood, threat of contamination and the loss of self-control.





Images: film stills and process drawings
Super 8 and 16mm processing and scan by erehwon film
With thanks to Esther Collins and George Capelas for footage contributions




Bedbugs & Other Intimacies

watercolour on paper
7.62 x 15.24 cm