Laura Benson (b. 1997, Birmingham, AL) is a multidisciplinary artist and jewelry maker. She received a BFA in drawing from the University of Alabama in Birmingham in 2019 before completing her MFA in painting and drawing at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2023. Through a variety of mediums, some of which include painting, spun cotton, soldering and metalcasting, Benson’s artwork is fixated on the surreal and cyclical elements of storytelling. Focusing on themes and archetypes of folklore and religious mythology, she works to express personal sentiments while simultaneously calling upon archaic collective experiences.

"By regarding the artistic process as the making of gateways, I intend for my art objects to exist as incantations made physical -as demonstrations of numinal curiosity. I draw from archetypes in an effort to bridge temporal gaps between symbols of the past and transformed present notions.

Melding found materials such as wooden clock parts, old book pages, antique charms, wooden textile stamps with processes such as painting, spun cotton, metalcasting and soldering, I work to make portals into the archaic mind. Often, my processes demand a relinquishing of control which lends space for the work to create a union between artist and object, with the intention of revealing something that can be as innately personal as it is collectively reflective. Illustrating with varying methods of painting, I create vignettes, creatures and sentiments which rely upon the compositing effect of intuitive decision making.

The influence of myth and story is inevitable in the imagery I utilize, with a focused eye on iconography from an epoch of history in which the unknown was a grand and living thing: a time when forests were dark and creatures were strange. When nature was both more supernatural and more familiar than it is to most of us now. I am interested in illustrating the collision of symbolic polarities and making art that chases the elusivity of magic in modernity."