“My painting practice is an attempt to portray absence and its presence within the everyday.

Painted with laborious details of lines adds an intensity and a psychological charge to what could be seen as mundane. They become both minimal in appearance yet are overloaded with information on closer inspection.

The muted images I paint play with something on the edge of visibility and it is also their relationship to transient elements; smoke, mist, fog and memory that is of interest. The idea of the trace, that what is seen emerges through what is not is important to me. In my work I don’t try to capture people, I try to mark their having been. The lines in my paintings accumulate like the echo of their footsteps. A bruise fades into the sky, a ghostly figure stands alone in the distance, a traffic cone has been knocked over..

The maze or labyrinths that are incorporated into the everyday scenes are not only symbolic of the psychological navigation of grief in everyday life, but also the feelings of being lost and trying to find a way out. The shape and contours of a labyrinth emerge from underneath the surface  as if there are connections to a network of roots, vibrations, wires or nerves.

The painted bruise image as a backdrop to these subtle scenes emphasises not only suffering and pain, but enhances the visible and the unseen; bruises also fade and disappear.

I want my paintings to act as memories – both ephemeral and fragile, yet at times vivid and all too present.”



Email: Laura.olohan@hotmail.co.uk
Instagram: @Laura.olohan



                                               CV




Education


MA Painting, Royal College of Art, 2024-2025

BA Fine Art, UCA Farnham 2012-2015


Exhibitions


Upcoming: Royal College of Art Degree Show, Battersea, June 2025


Solo


I Don’t Remember, Crisis, Elephant and Castle, 2024

Painted mural for Jealous Gallery & Print Studios, Shoreditch, 2021


Group


On Paper, Royal College of Art, Battersea, 2025


Beep Painting Prize, Elysium Swansea & Aberystwyth, 2024-25


Present x Correct curated by Contemporary Cymru, Corisca Studios, London, 2019 


Who Are We Hackney Wicked Festival, Hackney Wick, 2019 


CICA Experimental Film and Video exhibition, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, South Korea,  2018 


Liminal, Cambridge Artworks, 2017 


UCA Farnham Degree Show, 2015 


Futurity James Hockey Gallery, Farnham, Surrey, 2015 


Residencies

Threads, River Garage Studios, Dover. November 2018


Publications


Common People - A Folk History of Land Rights, Enclosure and Resistance by Stephen Ellcock and Leah Gordon, Watkins Publishing, 2025 

Jealous Rooftop Mural Project, Jealous Print Studios, 2021