laura mink

Artist Statement

My work is about changing roles and what happens when the structures that once defined us no longer hold. Focusing on roles dissolving and meaning must be renegotiated. The ART series is an expression of my experiences as a nurse, an artist, a mother to children entering their adulthood, newly divorced/single, and trying to find myself again within and outside of those mutating roles. Confessions of my innermost thoughts and feelings can be partially seen, as the layers obscure the viewing from easily reading them. This is much like we can see people and have a sense of what may be going on with them without knowing exactly what it is. Frustration, Joy, Sadness, Doubt and Peace...it's there.
The series deliberately collapses and interrogates the boundaries of fine art and street art word-based graffiti. The layers and partial exposures also function as visual memory—fragmented and incomplete—mirroring how memory itself operates. Within this visual memory there is repeated use of personal iconography. The spade recurs as a symbol with dual meaning, signifying both good luck and death—two conditions that I encounter frequently through my work in nursing. I also use 3dOH, which reads HOPE upside down, to address the dual nature of hope itself. Hope can sustain, but it can also be cruel. These contradictions—fortune and loss, optimism and harm—unresolved to reflect the human condition.
I am interested in transition as a forever active condition rather than a segway to a complete state. Because we are all, in one way or another, becoming something that we aren't yet.