Laurie Charles

°1987, BE - lives and works in Brussels (BE)

Laurie Charles is a visual and textual storyteller, she writes and paints speculative narratives on large canvases. Her artistic practice is multi-faceted, and has always been collaborative, responsive, socially engaged and choreographically conscious. She demonstrates a holistic approach to her work, consolidating and collapsing multiple fields to allow her to engage with a variety of ideas, disciplines, publics, and techniques across her productions.

She makes films in which she interweaves folklore, humanities, stories and historical narratives within a feminist perspective. For the artist, each project is an opportunity for in-depth research in which she brings together scattered elements in a fictional story and the outcome of this story is the resulting work.

Drawing deeply from her own personal experience with an autoimmune disease, Charles creates large-scale fabric pieces and soft furnishings that respond to ideas around the body through a macro lens. She undertakes to rewrite an alternative history of medicine to the one which has been engraved, where care, cycles, ecological disaster, and healing take precedence. She thinks of embodiment, fictional and non-human bodies, empathy and visualisation. She creates multiple objects that act as images in the traditional sense, but also as thresholds (curtains), bodily comforts (cushions), and stage props for storytelling in an exhibition scenario.

Laurie Charles shows her work internationally, including at Terzo Fronte, Roma; Wiels, Brussels; Efremidis Gallery, Berlin; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz; CIAP Kunstverein, Hasselt; 1646 – project space for contemporary art, The Hague; Nanjing International Art Festival; Beursschouwburg, Brussel; and Le Commissariat – Paris.

You can discover more of Laurie Charles’ work on her own website.