Laura Sharp Wilson

Leaving not an inch of unmarked space in her paintings-on-Japanese paper, Laura Sharp Wilson explores her own thoughts, contemporary culture, and our increasingly distanced relationship to nature in pattern-packed, abstract compositions. She describes herself as “mostly a painter with some sculpture thrown in—making obsessive, flat, tangled images on mulberry paper about being in this chaotic, contradictory world.” The fibrous texture of the paper serves as a fitting ground for her work, which stems from her studies of textile design and influences including plant and other natural forms, 18th-century Indian bed curtains, the Constructivist fabric designs of Varvara Stepanova, and the work of Keith Haring and Yayoi Kusama. Sharp Wilson covers the picture plane with vines, ropes, chains, wires, and other stretching, branching, and intertwined things, forming a web full of associations to the world beyond its borders.