In Laura Josephine Snyder’s work, she explores memory, emotion, and relationships through visual abstraction. She delves into the ways in which the signs and symbols found in the physical environment influence the movements of our minds and bodies. The imagery in her recent work is drawn from charts of ocean currents and a guide to weather symbols used for maritime navigation. These symbols form a language that she references and transforms through a material-driven process.
The rhythmic mark-making in much of her work carries the memory of the movement of her hand across the page or panel, with lines shifting from dark to light as the paintbrush leaves its trace. She often sources materials from her surroundings and processes them to make paint. Bright or contrasting colors on grounds of earth pigment serve as beacons or signs and punctuate the continuous rhythmic flow present in her larger, meditative pieces. Shapes and forms, collaged or painted, reference both weather patterns and emotional states; they are signal flags, akin to those that appear on beaches in red, yellow, or green, advising the beachgoer as to the state of the ocean on a given day.
The Traveling Drawings can be folded and unfolded like old road maps as she works on them, creating creases and wear on the paper. In referencing maps, she points to the history of cartography and counter cartographies, and she asks how moving through spaces or knowing places changes the traveler. The drawings begin as two stenciled lines, mirror images of one another. She slowly builds up the drawings, one parallel line after the next, working from one side of the paper and then the other until the undulating lines join and overlap. In this meeting of the two sides of the drawings, new shapes are formed–speaking to the Surrealist notion of a “third mind” or a “third memory” created in the space between an event and its retelling. By looking to the slow-moving cycles present in the natural world and sourcing many of her materials in nature, she engages with place and opens up space from which new patterns of thought, movement, and relationship can emerge.
Laura Josephine Snyder has shown her work nationally and internationally, including in Mexico City, Mexico, Bogotá, Colombia, Saint Petersburg, Florida, and Richmond, Virginia. She has an MFA from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a BFA in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design.