Laura Moriarty's Sculptures Made From Layers of Molten Beeswax

Art as we know is a purely subjective experience. What one person reads from a piece is often quite different to another. Laura Moriaty’s sculptural works have been likened to geodes, the captivating, colourful crystal rock formations that occur in sedimentary and volcanic rocks. In many ways, her art does indeed reflect that.

Self taught, Laura started her career in hand paper making. Since then she has been exploring sculpture and works on paper … “whose forms, colours, textures and patterns result from the same processes that shape and reshape the earth: heating and cooling, erosion, subduction, friction, enfolding, weathering, slippage.”

But her work also echoes the Sugar skulls of the Mexican tradition. Originating from the Mexican holiday, Dia de los Muertos (day of the dead) these colourful skulls were used to decorate the gravestones of the deceased. Originally made from clay-moulded sugar and decorated with beads, feathers, foils and icing the sculls were colourful and festive. Adopted from this period is the Mexican artwork we see today of the painted coloured skulls. In this way, Moriaty’s work is reminiscent of the same layering, fusion of colour and indeed even a skull like imagery in some of her work.

However, Moriaty’s festive pieces are not made from sugar. Instead she uses pigmented beeswax. Layers and layers of heated and cooled wax form multi-coloured rings.

“Layers of colour form the strata of a methodology in which the immediacy of the hand can translate a sense of deep time,” said Moriarty. “Working and reworking molten, richly pigmented beeswax, I build each painting/object through a slow, simple yet strenuous physical engagement, which often becomes a metaphor for the ephemerality of life and civilization.”

Just as the Mexican culture celebrated the day of the dead, the ‘ephemerality of life’ with the colour application and decoration on their skulls, here we see Moriaty’s reference to the ephemerality of life and civilisation with the same lust of colour and texture and form.