I Make My Own Rules

Inspired by the photograph of a well- known television presenter, the caption has been incorporated from a women’s magazine. Traditionally, women have not been encouraged to or even recognised as making their ”own rules” but have continued to follow those handed down from previous generations. This painting is intended to encourage the viewer to consider the idea behind the modern woman and how society is changing, giving women a bigger voice and platform than was the case in the past.

Laura Harris' work has always focused on the realities of the city. An earlier cycle of paintings looked particularly at her life in Brixton. These expressionist canvases fell into the category of descriptive narrative. Each work recounted an incident or event that the artist had either witnessed or more often than not, actually experienced; in that sense making them autobiographical. Recording and interpreting life in its raw and unrefined state: the post-coital encounter in the bedroom, the heady euphoria of the party; the artist is interested as much in the situation itself, as in the choreography of that situation. The artist is nostalgic for an age before Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat - a time when technology played a lesser role in our social correspondence. At art school, studies of the German expressionist artists such as Paula Modersohn Becker and Egon Schiele informed her earlier work. More recently, British artists Stella Vine’s bright painterly works on celebrity and Tracey Emin’s honest self-examinations, especially in her drawings, are key influences. Laura Harris trained at Wimbledon School of Art and completed a BA in Fine Art at the University of the West of England in 2001. She completed an MSc in Management with Creative Industries at the University of London in 2013.