“Small Bodies 2” (2023), paper assemblage, 9 x 12”
“The gift of the pandemic for me is that it gave me a chance to do something I had been thinking of for quite a while,” Laura Nugent said in a recent interview. “When everyone else was at the store buying toilet paper, I was at Blick (Art Materials) buying buckets of paint.”
For decades Nugent had made and successfully sold charming artworks of birds, trees and houses, exhibiting them at galleries and art fairs around the country. She also licensed her images to corporations such as Wayfair. But now she wanted to experiment with something very different. Something abstract. Something without conventional boundaries. Something that was entirely personal, although still embracing her love of color and pattern.
She took some paper in her studio, cut it irregularly, and then slathered on some paint.
“I loaded it with so much paint that it became thick like leather,” Nugent said. This process took her weeks, so she started using much thicker printing paper. “And then when all the paper in my studio ran out,” she explained, “I took a board and cut that up with a jigsaw and painted it. But that was so limited and time-consuming.”
Nugent eventually simplified her process by sending specific drawings of her works to Hammerspace Workshop in Kansas City, letting routers expertly cut out her designs on MDS fiberboard wood panels. She occasionally duplicates some of the same shapes, although each one is painted uniquely.
She then places the various structures throughout the floor in her studio, where she works on them for weeks at a time. Her compositions include gorgeously colored grids, or biomorphic forms that ooze from the corners, or works with slices of color that intersect one another throughout the picture plane. She has recently experimented with hourglass shapes, which she acknowledges is a reference to the female body as well as a continuation of her focus on organic shapes.
Throughout the 20th century until now the grid has been one the most consistently popular forms for avant-garde painters and sculptors, and nudes have been popular forever. But Nugent’s poetic versions of these forms are idiosyncratic, and markedly different from anyone else’s.
Most importantly, the outlines of her artworks are irregular and asymmetrical, while the interior marks, whether grids or amoebic in shape, love to turn corners and wander around on their own. And while many artists also make preparatory drawings before painting their grid works, Nugent’s works are entirely intuitive. Sol LeWitt made copies of his many grid structures which he gave to a trove of assistants who traveled the world copying his designs onto corporate boardrooms and swimming pools.
In contrast, Nugent insists that “I have to make each piece my own.” She establishes a left brain/right brain tension between the unexpected contours of her paintings and their more traditionally gridded interiors. These oppositions pull one in as they also compel our gaze to travel around the exterior of the work.
A male/female dance goes on in Nugent’s art, a synergistic, amiable struggle in which no one loses but neither side gains control. From there the possibilities appear endless.
Nugent is currently working on a major commission for 21c Museum Hotel Kansas City for their program “Elevate,” which presents temporary exhibitions of work by KC artists. She is in the process of painting the walls of floors three through seven with various patterns, upon which she will then install her wall paintings. Her show opens this spring and runs through July 15, 2024.
