Laura Tiffin

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

Laura Tiffin My work is digging around in the mess created by the collision between human hubris and fallibility—where a sense of superiority is forced to contend with error. This is a rough site which imagines an ever-evolving relationship between what it means to succeed or fail as a human, animal, or even as a material. In the process, I play with feelings and fantasies of control, dependency, intimacy, chance, hard work, and misfortune, in unexpected places or through strange company. I often employ visual conventions of innocence and cleanliness, restraint and safety, and subvert them though object configurations or textures that imply a rupture of this kind of artificially enforced order. Cleanly constructed, rigid and graphic bodily caricatures reside next to more helpless fleshy forms, forced-intimate moments between the body as Platonic ideal, and the reality of its malfunction. I’m interested in the way anthropomorphic objects can take a tumble into the uncanny valley and appear to become strangely animate, and when normally inanimate objects begin to thrum with life. I use buoyant materials—manufactured EVA foam (sheets or found readymade objects designed to float in water or absorb shock to the body) in combination with hand-molded Model Magic. Foam possesses a kind of immortal or divine quality as it will float inevitably, posing questions regarding that which should or should not sink—the choices around what is preserved or imperiled. Model Magic is...

Artwork