Laurie Charles

Artist, Resident

Laurie Charles (b. 1987, Belgium) lives and works in Brussels.

Is a visual and textual storyteller, she writes and paints speculative narratives on large canvases. Her artistic practice is multi-faceted, and has always been collaborative, responsive, socially engaged and choreographically conscious. She demonstrates a holistic approach to her work, consolidating and collapsing multiple fields to allow her to engage with a variety of ideas, disciplines, publics, techniques across her productions.

She makes films in which she interweaves folklore, humanities, stories and historical narratives within a feminist perspective. For the artist each project is an opportunity for in-depth research in which she brings together scattered elements in a fictional story and the outcome of this story is the resulting work.

Drawing deeply from her own personal experience with an autoimmune disease, Charles creates largescale fabric pieces and soft furnishings that respond to ideas around the body through a macro lens. She undertakes to rewrite an alternative history of medicine to the one which has been engraved, where care, cycles, ecological disaster, and healing take precedence. She thinks of embodiment, fictional and non-human bodies, empathy and visualisation. She creates multiple objects that actes as images in the traditional sense, but also as thresholds (curtains), as bodily comforts (cushions), and as stage props for storytelling in an exhibition scenario.

Charles’ way of working is inextricably tied to her ways of living, as such the personal is always also political.