Laura in front of Stove Works. Photo: Saria Smith
Laura McAdams is an artist from Kingsport Tennessee who lives and works in New York City. Her work describes our built environment, a cultural landscape that she sees as the real mirror of being alive. Through sculpture, installation, and writing she attempts to unbuild, rebuild, and reinvent these structures in physical and conceptual forms that place the human at the center, either the self or collective. She allows the idea or material to lead the work to its final form. She is also pursuing other interests in social work and community organizing in New York. She is currently collaborating with Peyton, a fellow resident, on an upcoming project. They have installed a piece in the Hot Doughnuts show, the resident showcase at Stove Works.
Saria: Why do you create art, what is your art a response to?
Laura: For me, the seed of an idea can turn into anything, for instance like my bread essay, it's seeing a metaphor as it applies to my life. I'm really attracted to materialist metaphors that are metonymies for the body, the self, the collective. For me, it's the experience of making the thing and the ideas behind it. While form is important aesthetic qualities don’t drive the work.
Saria: What have you been thinking about lately or reading or looking at?
Laura: I kind of stopped looking at art about a year ago. I've been working in the art world for a while and it's been challenging to be inside of that system and I felt a need to return to the ritual of daily life. A lot of my past work comes from modes of production that I was around. I was always working with those processes and people so it's more like construction heavy, 3D modeling, 3D printing, and things like that. Lately, I've been really drawn to craft traditions and making in a more meditative way to reconnect with the work. This is also tied to the things I'm reading. I've been reading Silvia Federici and breaking away from art theory and thinking more of political ideas. That's been really satisfying for me creatively. Also, Ursula Le Guin’s Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction has been a touchstone for me lately.
Saria: What have you been working on recently?
Laura: I'm actually here collaborating with another resident Peyton, her studio is right next door to mine. We have something installed for the Hot Doughnuts show. It's been really fun to work together and very encouraging. There have always been overlaps in our work but it feels like it's turning into something real. Our collaboration is still very early on, there's a lot to figure out but it feels great and I'm really excited for the future of it.
Saria: What attracts you to art that focuses on installation?
Laura: I often describe my work as an example of a cultural landscape or what it's like to be a body and have an experience inside of a place. I think an altered physical space sometimes feels like the most palpable way to experience that, it's tangible. I don't really like rules in terms of what kind of art I like to make, sometimes it's a video, sometimes I like to let the idea drive the product. There's a very healthy incubation period before it turns into a thing. Often it becomes an installation because it's the most open-ended form.
Saria: Do you think art school was beneficial to you?
Laura: In short, yes. It has its negatives, but it was a great experience. I’m really lucky to still have mentors from that experience. It's trite but it’s true that you have to learn some rules to break them. I feel like I've learned so many rules at this point that all I want to do is unlearn. That’s what my work feels like it is now, this unlearning back to very foundational ways of making. Sometimes when you're given examples in the history of other artists, you see kinships in ideas, lineages of your craft. It can be exciting, someone giving form to something you've felt for a long time. And it can be really informative to feel the legacy of an artist before you. I loved my undergraduate education, It was worth it for me. I think art is such a personal expression and it's not right for everyone. I think art schools are a flawed institution but they also do give people community support, and access to knowledge at the same time.
“Untitled” by Laura McAdams and Peyton. Installed during Hot Doughnuts Now at Stove Works.
Saria: Can you talk about the inspiration behind your Bread essay?
Laura: I was particularly frustrated at that time of my life with both personal and art worlds. I felt a lack of humanity in that moment. I needed to connect with something that expressed collectivity. A real foundational part of human experience, to be nourished, figuratively and literally. It was written in a cultural context more than an art context. One reason I used that as a form was that it was not explicitly art, it was something a little different. I had been frustrated with trying to make sculptures. The inspiration was also all the things I was doing. I was working at a food pantry volunteering, and participating in mutual aid. Cooking a lot, like a lot. It was written at the height of Covid so no one could go anywhere. Something I've always loved is cooking and sharing food with friends and family. The pandemic really solidified some of my feelings around my neo-liberal life. I found this revolution in words and actions. For me, sometimes the art is in charge of the form. That was definitely the case for this piece, it just happened to me.
Saria: Your work has a lot to do with the human body, what inspired that influence beyond just the fact that you have a body?
Laura: I’ve thought a lot about the location or site of knowledge. Where does that come from? We all have pedagogies that teach us ways to know. But for me, knowledge also comes from experience. It is embodied or felt rather than taught and internalized. That’s a central part of my work. That’s why the body is always present, it is the site of embodied knowledge. It is a metonymy. A part becomes whole. A singular expression of a metaphor that lives inside of you.
Saria: You're also a writer, Is writing an integral part of your process with the physical pieces?
Laura: For me, writing isn't really a linear process to develop ideas, but it is another creative mode. It's very different from sculpture because of the way sculpture unfolds in front of you. There's material research, you have to touch it. Sculpture just is and writing translates that experience. It might be like a mode of processing but it's not a way I really work through ideas, more as another means of expression. It can be freeing because it is so immediate, You can always pull out your phone, or pen and paper and get things out.
Saria: What is the relationship between images and audio in your work? What do you want that to do for the viewer?
Laura: Writing, installation, and sculpture are my primary modes of working and I wanted to try and figure out how to combine these two things. There are some pieces not on my website, because they're older, where I've made videos that attempt this, but it doesn’t work as well for me because I prefer to work on a physical plane. I feel most at home in sculpture as a form, but writing felt like a legend for some of the pieces. I want to join them and create a unique experience with the work. The works you're talking about are together as a four-part installation, married with a four-part essay. I'm not sure how well that really worked because the nature of an installation is that it is more amorphous. In writing formats, the writer has more power over what the viewer experiences first. Which anecdote or essay comes first. In sculpture, the viewer has more freedom when you look at each thing. I'm trying to explore playing with that format.
Saria: How do you relate to your art personally?
Laura: It's always personal, it's always expressive. It's just a matter of how many lenses I put between the viewers and my feelings or how much ambiguity I layer into the work. It happens sometimes where I don't know how I feel and I need to express that ambiguity. Of that in-between feeling, that's something i feel will never go away, there's always conflict. The bread essay too. There's conflict. My strategy of survival and my family’s, collective survival, they don't all go together, we're all just trying.
A Spill, A Line, A Drift. water, aluminum, paint, foam, 2016. In collaboration with Sam Morgan
Saria: Has there ever been a moment where you wanted to drastically change your medium?
Laura: Yeah all the time, I crave novelty in the work and when it starts to feel formulaic I need a new form. I don't stick to the media. I flirt with all of them. The one thing that I don't sit with often or don't use anymore is drawing but that's just because 3d modeling took over that in my practice so it's not gone just digital. I'm always looking for the next format for the next idea I have.
Saria: What does community mean to you?
Laura: I've kind of struggled with that this year as well because Covid has been really isolating and we are all just trying to be okay. I'm really involved in Mutual Aid and I've decided to pursue social work as a new career and to be engaged with communities of all different backgrounds because I feel like that doesn't happen in art, it just isn't real. I want to live my People are egalitarian in their viewpoints but they don't really approach them in a practical sense, that's something I'm trying to do now. I want to live my values every day. That's a shift for me and part of that is because my art is very personal, it's not community-oriented. Community is your friends, locality, family, chosen or natal. People build communities of resiliency at all different scales.
Saria: What has it been like for you here in this community at Stove Works?
Laura: I think it's a challenging time but I've appreciated getting to know the other artists here. I kind of removed myself from the art world for the last year for self-preservation reasons and it's been good to meet other artists who have the same values. We're in a setting where no one's trying to win, we are just here to get to know other people and share our work
Saria: How has this time as a resident at Stove Works grown you?
Laura: I really needed to pay attention to my practice and allow it to grow in new ways and I think having space and time away from my life could help me find it again in a way that is productive. Collaborating with Peyton has been affirming because I've made lots of radical life changes in the last year and it's challenging to be creative in a global crisis. Working with her has been great because every time I have an idea I have someone to bounce it off of, we can workshop. A word that keeps coming up is resonance. When you can resonate with someone you know it’s a real experience.
Saria: What are you doing after you leave Stove Works?
Laura: I'm going to move back to New York City and I'm going to go to grad school for social work. I also haven't been organizing when I've been here because I don't live in Chattanooga. To do community work you have to be there a long time so I will get back into that. I've been a little involved but at a distance. I'm looking forward to that. I also think that Peyton and I will formulate some kind of proposal for a future project.
To see more of Laura’s work:
https://lauramcadams.net/