About Laura Humphreys
Biography
Laura Humphreys is a British artist from Northern England, currently living and working in Mexico City. With a First-Class degree in Psychology and a background in science and drawing, her practice is informed by an interest in perception, visual recognition and the ways people interpret their surroundings. Working primarily with oil paint, Humphreys explores how light interacts with images and materials, shifting the way familiar forms are seen and understood. Her work combines recognisable imagery with ambiguous, partially obscured forms, using translucent layers, blurred underpainting and processes of distortion and repetition. Through experimentation with wax, pastel, charcoal, aluminium and digital image-making, she investigates how surfaces absorb, transmit and reflect light. After three years living in Mexico City, her attention has increasingly turned towards the relationship between light, atmosphere and place. The city's distinctive atmospheric conditions, where haze and suspended particles diffuse colour and soften visibility, have prompted an exploration of how images change under different environmental conditions. This interest extends into questions of memory, distance and nostalgia, particularly how experiences of place become compressed into fragments of colour, form and visual information. Humphreys frequently works with paired images and diptychs, using subtle differences between related compositions to explore how recognition changes through repetition. Her paintings occupy an uncertain space between visibility and obscurity, where images remain present but resist complete resolution. She recently completed an artist residency at Casa Lü in Mexico City, where she developed new work exploring the effects of light on the body and the painted surface. Her ongoing practice continues to investigate the relationship between material, perception and the unstable nature of visual experience.
Personal statement
My practice explores how layered materials hold and transform experiences of light. Working primarily with oil paint, I bring recognisable imagery into conversation with more ambiguous forms, investigating how images shift through distortion, repetition and partial recognition. I experiment with wax, pastel, charcoal and aluminium to explore how surfaces absorb, transmit and reflect light. Working in Mexico City has sharpened my attention to light as a condition of perception rather than simply a visual subject. Noticing how colour and familiar forms shift under different atmospheric and environmental conditions has led me to consider how images are mediated by the conditions through which they are seen. In my paintings, translucent, absorbent and reflective materials make these shifts tangible, complicating the relationship between an image and its recognition. I work with multiples and diptychs, where subtle differences between related images become consequential. Through repetition, I examine how images change when revisited, and how recognition is shaped by what remains obscured. Blurred underpainting persists beneath subsequent layers, allowing earlier images to remain active without being fully legible. My work attends to the unstable space between seeing and recognising, where images are continually transformed by the conditions of their appearance.
Painting, light and seeing