A Healing Dream: Laura Footes

17 Nov 2024-16 Feb 2025

Overview

A Healing Dream is a solo exhibition by British artist Laura Footes, curated by Tracey Emin.

For her first exhibition at the gallery, Laura Footes (b. 1988 Birmingham, UK) presents a body of work exploring dysfunction and healing from the perspective of someone who has been living with a long term chronic illness since childhood. In Footes' dream-like paintings, a cast of ghost-like forms are rendered through an elastic timeframe, occupying almost hallucinatory space yet tethered to a familiar reality. These new paintings are deliberately set in the familiar spaces of the home, as this is where a sick person spends most of their time. Memory plays a central role in how the work is formed as the convalescent has only memories and imagination to draw from, whilst they wait in the purgatory of home to recover.

"We are all islands inside our bodies - nobody can ever know what it is like to be us, but there is so much beauty and relatability in our different experiences and perspectives. This body of work aims to share the shadows and magic of one persons strange interior world, with the hope that others will see something of themselves in it too and feel less alone.” 
— Laura Footes