Artist Statement

After several country moves during the formative years of my life, and later as an immigrant to Canada, a sense of cultural loss and the search for a place to call home have been preoccupations that have persistently emerged in my work. Art has been a way to process my interior landscape and at times it has been a catalyst for action, prompting me to instigate interventions into the everyday to mitigate the absence of belonging.

French philosopher Felix Guattari said more than forty years ago, “microscopic attempts of the community…play an absolutely crucial role,” this thinking has been the impetus behind my projects, and it is why I devise encounters that allow for one-to-one or small group interaction, ranging thus far from interviews and letter writing services to passers-by, to participatory yarn installations, and from group walks to cooking in the kitchen with others. When working with materials, I lean towards the low-tech and the accessible, and typically focus on the experience and the doing of the project, favouring process over finished product. This has led to recent projects where I have been engaging with embroidery, found objects, walking, and gathering in the kitchen. These new materials and methods have led me to explore what it means to have an embodied practice and have amplified the element of repetition in my work. Through repetition, I engage in a research-oriented practice that takes the everyday as the sight of exploration.

Biography

Laura Bucci is an interdisciplinary artist working with interventions, textiles, printed matter, food, participatory works and socially engaged projects. Her work explores issues of loneliness and belonging and mostly manifests itself in attempts to disrupt the everyday and to make connections with the public through planned and chance encounters. She has shown in Vancouver, BC, and Nova Scotia at community and public galleries and artist run spaces. Several of her projects have also occurred in the public space unaffiliated to a gallery or institution. She holds a BFA from NSCAD and is a second generation Italian Canadian immigrant living and practicing in Halifax, in Mi’kma’ki Territory and sometimes on unceded Coast Salish Territory in Vancouver. She is currently undertaking a masters in art education at NSCAD.