We recently connected with Laura Yurko and have shared our conversation below.

Laura, appreciate you joining us today. Are you able to earn a full-time living from your creative work? If so, can you walk us through your journey and how you made it happen?

I thankfully have, although I lean more into the idea of “creative” than my work as a professional artist. I believe to have the freedom to make the work that I want to make and be able to pursue a train of thought through divergent bodies of work I need that to exist in a world separate from commodification. For me, that would affect the end product beyond the goals that I have for my work; instead of writing a poem, I’d be writing a greeting card, considering marketable traits over risk-taking and experimentation.

My day job is still very intertwined with my life and skills as an artist. I’m just as invested in the works I make during the day, even if I don’t consider them to be part of my personal art works. I’ve been a freelance Production Designer and Art Director in the Independent Film Industry for about 3 years now, and have recently added gigs working as a Floral Installation Artist in the Events Industry.

I first got my start with film through a close friend that was working at the time in the camera department. He was on a project that needed an original logo of a lion eating pizza for props and costumes. It was so fun and refreshing to create something purely to be cute and funny, something that would start out digital, be translated to the physical world, and then back to digital in the final film. After that they brought me on into a more permanent role on the film and I was able to meet more people on set and create lasting connections in that way. Meeting people on set is the best way to get onto more projects, and each project you get on means more connections and opportunities to show what you can do. The most important things are following up, working hard, and being a good person honestly. I’m always trying to get better at my craft while also honing my communication skills. Whatever I learn about myself as an artist or person on set, I can take that back with me into my personal practice and life, one always fueling and motivating the other.

I think the pacing of getting to a comfortable point of having a full-time creative job depends on the person. I wouldn’t have the info that I needed to feel solid on my decision unless I lived through the different stages, but I’m the type of person that has a very wide range of interests and has to check them off through living it. I started off working as a Workshop and Gallery Assistant in the field I more closely relate to, but I find the work I do now more relevant and invigorating than ever! I think once you pick the direction you want to head in and find the skills and ways of working that you naturally gravitate to, that career will open up and you’ll see a viable path quicker than you thought.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

As an interdisciplinary artist, I switch between different mediums including painting, sculpture, performance art, fiber art, and installation. I like to use these different visual languages so I can articulate and explore multiple perspectives of the same topic. The intimacy, ephemerality, and unpredictability of performance art will have a very different relationship with the audience than an installation piece that they feel open and comfortable to explore. I love guiding those experiences and getting to see the varying reactions and nonverbal conversations the audience has with my work.

I’m thankful that I grew up going to the Cleveland Museum of Art with my parents very often. As a kid I noticed that it felt different in that space: time slowed down, things weren’t said as straight forward, and these different objects could have so many different tones happening at once, being silly but serious, realistic but otherworldly. These were the most inspiring moments, seeing the works of M. C. Escher, Dali, Rothko, Degas, Bourgeois, and Kusama all in the same building. Nothing else made me as filled up with such an all-encompassing feeling of conflicting emotions. It left so much space for me to be a part of the work’s conversation and to figure out the puzzle of meaning left within the piece. That’s how I knew this is what I want to be, versus other artist identities.
From there I was lucky enough to go to art school at The Cleveland Institute of Art and majored in Painting with minors in Animation and Sculpture. This gave me a great chance to connect with so many different types of professional artists which lead to the opportunity to work on the administrative side of the gallery world right out of college. I worked as a Gallery and Workshop Assistant at Praxis Fiber Workshop and later as the Marketing Assistant at Heights Arts. From there I shifted into working in film. I was wanting to work more hands on, utilizing the craft skills of being an artist while working in a field that meant so much to me. Being able to blend a piece of the subject matter alongside the crafting skills that I focus on in my work with my day job’s subject matter and responsibilities has given back in so many ways. This is what gives me the time to practice the skills and get even better at the work I want to make and once I have time off I can apply it. Every job along the way has helped shape and give back to my gallery practice.

My work focuses on a playful investigation of the development of the self through social interactions and the routines of everyday life. This is exemplified through affordable, gaudy materials and the child-like visualization of traditional, domestic events, attachments to archetypal characters, and familiar phrases. Infusing an overt implementation of the typically repressed subconscious with our entertainment, our morning routines, or how we communicate, we can garner a more sincere take on our otherwise over-looked experiences and needs. The absurdity of our everyday choices and priorities are reconsidered and critiqued by dramatizing the mundane.

The combination of flashy and cheap materials brings a relatable yet energizing tone to my body of work. Scanning over my work feels like a trip to JoAnn’s that’s gotten out of hand. The bold color palette serves as a rebellious contrast to marketed muted “high-end” color palettes and is more akin to the marketing of childhood, a time where the subconscious was not yet shamed and when play was unrestrained. The accumulation and abstraction of these materials provides an opportunity for curiosity and investigation through the multiple layers of processes and references.

By both encouraging a return to play and inferring the darker half of memory retrieval, the viewer is caught between the two states of the suppressed child and the conforming adult. The work provides a space for reflection as well as empathizing with other’s and their own experiences, needs, and desires.

We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

One of the lessons I’ve had to unlearn, and continue to consciously slow down and observe when it creeps back in, is keeping an open mind. Which initially sounds like a good thing, a quality I take pride in that I’ve actively worked on developing, but the double edged sword to that is the people pleaser element in it. I think a lot of times when artists ask for a critique or get feedback during an exhibition of their work, there’s part of them that will internalize all of the comments as facts. While I was in art school all I wanted to do was soak up as much as I could while I was there, but unavoidably after speaking with enough different artists and mentors the advise started to show up more and more in conflict with each other. One professor would advise to always think about the concept before committing paint to canvas and another professor would say the process would render the most sincere translation of the thoughts. All of these pieces of advise are invaluable and build a healthy scope of what is out there, of what can be done, but at the end of the day the lesson is not physically what they were saying but my ability as an artist to synthesize the spectrum of options and ultimately filter out what I want to do.

Being a sponge is a great way to enter the classroom, but as a life-long learner, keeping in touch with your own opinion is how to reach the next level of creating your work. Keep an open mind but know when to make the call based on nothing but yourself. This will make the work better too and more specific to being created by you.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I think that all art is a way for the viewer to record their questions and observations of the world in the broadest sense. I’ve always had a deep connection with both the entertainment world as well as the fine art world. I feel equally shaped by these environments and one will offer something the cannot. Seeing artists that blend these worlds, like Philip Guston or Joyce Pensato was inspiring to me to try to bring the entertainment world to the fine art world, and vice versa when watching a David Lynch film or Lars Von Trier. As an adult I’ve worked in both the fine art and entertainment environments, seeing more clearly how they overlap and diverge in their techniques and conversations. My goal is to walk the line between these worlds, to create something entertaining that has a serialized lore from piece to piece, while still feeling at home in a gallery. My previous work lived more on the side of Joyce Pensato, where it leaned on an intertextuality to bring the entertainment world into the work through visual references, but as time goes on my work becomes more time based, in the focus on stop motion animation.

The second level to this goal outside of personal connection and craftsmanship, is the content. Entertainment and story have direct links to stoking empathy in the viewers. Through capitalizing on this structure of audience participation the goals and questions of the work can be more deeply internalized as an experience or story to remember. I want to communicate my different artistic explorations and observations in a softer, more familiar tone that can also be otherworldly. Familiar yet strange, entertaining yet meditative; a way to have false dichotomies sitting together.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.laurayurkoart.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurayurkoart/?hl=en
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/laura-yurko-583189116/