about
Laura was given her first doll’s house for Christmas, 1995. Delightful years were spent visiting miniature shops, fairs and museums, collecting tiny crockery with pocket money and learning about historical interiors. But life got in the way, as it ever does, and her love of miniatures was boxed up along with her doll’s house.
She believed she forgot about miniatures in the intervening years, studying for a BA in Fine Art and, after a enforced break for illness, an MFA in which she gained a distinction. But in retrospect, her affinity with miniatures was still informing her creative work - everything she made in an attempt to give form to her lived experiences was small, delicate, and detailed. She developed a subtle, poetic visual language, favouring the emotive and meaningful, the time-worn and incidental, the patina of life; the fragile and elegiac that nonetheless survives the everyday. Her distinctive language, ever hovering between beautiful and overlooked, was grounded in the mimesis of everyday domestic objects across a prolific study of mediums.
On becoming ill with a post-viral illness, she found creating (always small) things helped her cope with her condition, and by the time the pandemic threw the full-scale world into disarray she had recalled the peace and contentment of the miniature world. Like many she documented her miniatures during lockdown and found a community of others looking for the comfort, meditation, and simple happiness the hobby provides. She hopes the pandemic will be the catalyst for another change - that the study of long-covid will repair her health and, eventually, allow her a practice and academic study of miniatures.
But for now she is happy to pour all she’s learned into making objects full of character, experience, and poetry.
Moth House began as a shop-come-studio, to one day attach to my childhood dolls house. Its use has changed over two years but at the moment, it’s to be a tea house where books can be read, art can be enjoyed, and gathered treasures can be bought - mainly brought about by my particular love of chairs and crockery. It has a ‘secret’ attic studio space where the alternate, tiny version of me (who can climb a lot of steep, crooked stairs) can create and imagine by lamplight.
The building itself is a study of a semi-rural Georgian building extensively renovated in the Victorian period; it bears traces of its original incarnation in bricked-up windows, useless lintels, and original floorboards; there will be worn carriage steps and the ghost advertisement for tea or a circulating library. There are firmly Welsh features included or planned in affection, such as flagstone floors and slate roof tiles, carved hearth stones and window panes ever running with rain.