Artist statement

I am unhappy with all my previous statements. I have said things in the past that I didn’t mean (and they were not as satisfactory as I had originally hoped them to be). They were vague. They were complicated. It was all absurd. It made no sense at all.

This one is much better:

Laura Fitzgerald is an artist. She is practicing (getting better at getting worse, slowly but surely). She makes drawings, videos, installations and paintings. Her work is personal and political. She has notions to be someone like Robert Smithson but she has to be realistic. Although Dad was okay about the mountain poem, sadly he is not onboard with a Spiral Jetty down the marsh. 

She is interested in the rural but she is also interested in internationalism – she wants to be David Shrigley. He is the kind of artist that can have a show in the Hayward Gallery, London, and a greeting card range. Laura is considering cards as a business, her Mother always said she made really lovely cards.  

Laura Fitzgerald’s practice involves you. Come on in, tell me what’s wrong with you and I will write you a prescription which (disclaimer) may or may not really help you. If you are sad I will try to tell you something ridiculous about myself. It is good to laugh. 

Sometimes I will prescribe a dose of large-scale drawings to, say, deal with compacted geographical narratives, family rows over private property disputes, postcolonial trauma, ancestral guilt or magic. Other times I might prescribe you to just sit down.

Laura Fitzgerald’s work is essentially a stick; a gnarly knobbly piece of hawthorn. A pointer. She hopes that within this activity that there might be something cathartic in it for you. But that may be only something we can find out at your next appointment, or in time.