Laura Barth is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in North Carolina. Primary media include analog and experimental photographic processes, graphite, charcoal, watercolour, and hand-carved prints.
This body of work explores matrimony as more than a legal or romantic institution, though the imagery can certainly be interpreted through that lens.
Here, matrimony becomes a state of longing, of becoming, of binding. It reflects a yearning for physical intimacy, but also a pull beyond the body toward something more liminal: a spiritual marriage, a sacred tethering of energies across time, space, and form.
It is also a meditation on the undefined yet undeniable relationships we sometimes encounter where the connection feels fated. Within the simple black borders of the Polaroid frame, I explore daydreams, longing, telepathy, unspoken desires, transformation, messages revealed only in dreams, and personal growth. Are these actually relationships with others—or with hidden aspects of ourselves?
Through layered emulsions and hand-cut Polaroids, I also enact a union within the medium itself by joining disparate images, physical emulsions, gestures, and fragments into new, embodied wholes. The emulsion, once on a Polaroid, is now bound to a new medium. Each piece is a collage of relational energy: two trees reaching toward each other across a fogged field; a young figure conjuring connection; a figure in mourning under a wedding canopy.
This work is imbued with the desire to touch, to be seen, and to become part of something beyond the self. It is a ritual, a reckoning, and an invocation of what cannot be named, but can be felt.
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