Laurel Sparks
Laurel Sparks’ paintings are explosive. Liquid forms and vivid colors surge across surfaces, or blast apart into arrays of strings and particles. These near-hallucinatory images are informed not only by visual elements borrowed from science and the natural world, but also by the artist’s fascination with elements of pattern in the decorative arts that parallel visual phenomena within biology, technology,
cosmology, and cartography. Morphed together, these sources combine to suggest an otherworldly place of sheer energy, where nothing is static and everything is in the process of becoming.
Sparks ’ involvement with the decorative is so thorough that she borrows materials as well as images from the world of craft. Pieces of patterned fabric, glitter, pom-poms, and other eccentric materials appear in the surfaces of her work to add texture, reflection, and dimensionality, and also to underscore the notion of art as artifice. They also lend her imagined worlds a bit of what she calls “festive morbidity.”
Laurel Sparks resides in Jamaica Plain, MA
Image: Laurel Sparks, Joy and Its Opposite, 2005, acrylic, marble dust, collage on canvas, 72” x 69”, Lent by the Artist, Courtesy Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston, MA
