Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, drawing, poetry
Website: laurafiga.com
Laura Figa was born in 1992 in Chicago, Illinois, and lives and works in San Francisco. She received a BA in English Literature from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Fine Arts from the California College of the Arts in 2018, where she received both the Curator's Choice Award at the Commencement Exhibition and the Graduate Fine Arts Written Thesis Award. She is represented by Et al. gallery in San Francisco, where she has had two solo exhibitions. She is also a member of the staff at Creativity Explored, a San Francisco studio supporting artists with developmental disabilities.
Figa works in sculpture, drawing, and poetry, with graphite as her primary material — chosen for its simultaneous hardness and softness, its capacity to both inscribe and be inscribed. Her sculptures are hand-carved from solid graphite and exist at a deliberately intimate, hand-held scale: tool-like objects that recall wind instruments, tablets, tuning forks, and dowsing rods, objects whose communicative potential is activated only in relation to a body. On beds of kraft paper and felt, her works lie near one another, enacting what she describes as a core premise of her practice: contact as a form of inscription.
Her drawings draw from the notational worlds of music, dance, and written language — the standardized systems humans use to record movement and sound across time — attending to their formalism while probing what they cannot capture. She is interested in the game-like qualities of such systems, their internal logic, and the occasionally nefarious underbellies of apparently neutral codes. The resulting works are quiet and architecturally precise, yet resist easy legibility: familiar marks that operate within reach of known vocabularies without replicating them.
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