Laura's Story
Laura Hesp is a Toronto-based contemporary visual artist working across painting, sculpting, and illustration.
Her recent poetry and paintings explore women's survival through grief, sensuality, and isolation. Previous projects have centered on social justice-based fundraising and events, commissioned paintings of real women's bodies, graphic design, illustration, and life-sized fairy garden sculptures (no seriously, go look, it was cool!)
With sharp humour and a deliberately intimate edge, Laura's body of work examines our shared human experiences with community and friendship, complex family dynamics, grief, sexuality, and survival. Her paintings and illustrations resonate because they blend and express these heavy experiences through vibrant watery colours, fluid details, and intuitive markings. These bold, abstract layers originally stood on their own, but in recent collections you'll find them woven within powerful imagery of nude women, forest creatures, and natural foliage.
Her work is typically collected by people navigating the threshold of fear and self-actualization. Her followers and collectors look for art that evokes strength, femininity, yearning, and survival.
Laura's art, writing, and storytelling are an expression of that journey inward.
Artist Statement:
“After decades of living life behind the perfect mask, I began rapidly cycling through periods of death and rebirth.
Each collection has captured a deeper period of healing and integration between my soul, my body, my sensuality, and the fear of expressing it all.
The progression from abstracts to fragmented body parts to full figurative paintings of women in their environment is a timeline of the confrontation, acceptance, and eventual love of my own full self."