Laura Splan
Laura Splan is an artist and researcher mining the materiality of biotechnology to reveal poetic subjectivities. Her mixed media projects destabilize notions of the presence and absence of bodies evoking the mutability of categories that delineate their status. Splan’s work compels an intimate engagement with detail calling into question how things are made and what they are made of. Her current work combines biomedical imagery and artifacts with sculptures made from the hand-spun fiber of laboratory animals. Simple interactions implicate the viewer in metaphors of cellular biology framed by narratives of the penetration of membranes and transgression of boundaries.
Splan's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design and Beall Center for Art + Technology. Her work is included in the Thoma Art Foundation collection and has been commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control Foundation. She has received research funding from The Jerome Foundation and her residencies have been supported by The Knight Foundation and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University teaching interdisciplinary courses including “Embodied Interfaces” (2018) and “Art & Biology” (2011). Her recent Digital Arts Fellowship at AS220 Industries received support from the National Endowment for the Arts.