Laurie Steen
Laurie was a Canadian artist whose work primarily centred on drawing. Sadly taken from us at a young age in 2023, she was heavily influenced by the natural environment in and around her family home in Devon. Laurie’s detailed drawings served as portraits of the landscape and reflections on the ever-changing surroundings of the English countryside.
Laurie studied Fine Art at the University of Calgary, later completing her B.I.D. at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture, where she received the thesis prize. With over 25 years of international exhibition experience, Laurie consistently showed her work in the UK, Canada, and Switzerland. Laurie said:
“I am continually readdressing my connection to my landscape and the emotion of newness it instils in me.
My work has always felt full of paradoxes sitting happily beside each other. From lightness and darkness, emptiness and fullness, to finding the extraordinary within the ordinary, and the notion of ‘nothing and everything’. I am continually intrigued by the pull of negative space and more specifically how light shapes us and gets through the shadows.
This idea seems to play out quite literally in the vignettes of roads and nearby fields. I feel this whenever I am rendering the architecture of nature; there is always light to be found in the dark and there is a fondness and a knowing when revisiting familiar places. It all feels very personal. The hedge shadows are permanently changing yet imprinted into the landscape and are unforgettable.
The lines I leave on a drawing have much to do with making a mark at my first point of contact with a subject or a place; my first ‘pulling in’ or commitment to a drawing. The construction lines centre me and in essence reveal small truths about my thought processes.
I have always seen nature as a series of structures or patterns within a larger natural order – our (vertical) human presence sharing space within a wild (horizontal) landscape. Images rendered are usually places touched with memory: a worn humanness, still and silent. A wholly unexpected moment, showing the extraordinary in the ordinary, that if isolated and remembered, could help me define the essence of my connection to and ‘way of being’ in nature. I like to think that these works share my human connection to nature , and in turn make visible a ‘humanness’ I see and feel in the landscape by rendering it. But mostly, to show that it has been remembered.”
Laurie’s work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections and she regularly exhibited her work internationally. In 2015, she was elected an academician of the Royal West of England Academy (RWA). Some recent group exhibitions include the 2017/18 Jerwood Drawing Prize, the 2018 and 2019 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, as well as every biannual DRAWN exhibition with the RWA.
