Laura Lowe
Nárkissos
6–30 March 2025
In the Narcissus myth a youth falls fatally in love with their refl ection on the surface of a pool. A tale of vanity, self-centeredness, and insatiable desire, it contains an unsettling amount we can relate to.
Lowe has created these latest works using sea salt and the last coal from the Salmisaari power plant. The dark, glassy layers of paint resemble a rapidly melting ice landscape. The refl ective surfaces of the works draw us dangerously close and awaken in us a similar desire to look and touch. In Lowe’s paintings, coal transforms into a black mirror where the viewer must confront themselves. The viewer’s shadow falls onto the image, disrupting the refl ection like ripples on the surface of water.
The colours of Lowe’s paintings emerge from the interplay of light and surface — the merging of the immaterial with the material. The paintings respond to their environment, shifting with the light and weather conditions, and with the viewer’s movements.
In Oscar Wilde’s reinterpretation of the myth, Narcissus’s death inevitably leads to the destruction of nature. The pool sheds tears until its fresh water eventually turns salty. It too has encountered its own refl ection, mirrored in the youth’s eyes, and has fallen captive to its own beauty.
LAURA LOWE (b.1991 Vantaa) is a Helsinki-based painter working with structural colour. Her practice investigates immaterial colours produced through the refraction of light, akin to the eff ect of a prism, rather than from conventional pigments. Her paintings, which resemble the iridescent spectra of oil slicks, are the culmination of two years of meticulous laboratory research. A recent graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki (‘23), Lowe’s MFA degree show was awarded the Anita Snellman Stipend. Since then, Lowe has completed her fi rst public commission, after winning First Prize and Audience Favourite in the Hotel GLO Art competition; and received the Oskar Öfl unds Grant for her paintings made with coal from the closure of the Hanasaari power plant. Lowe is currently working at the HIAP residency in Suomenlinna, and has been selected for the Bioart Society’s Ars Bioarctica residency at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, to continue research linking fossil fuels and disappearing ice.
Contact details
www.lauralowe.art
lauralowestudio (a) gmail.com
@lauralowestudio
040 565 1520
