Hands made from silicone attached to ropes and pulleys. Long, pink tentacle-like fabric tubes hung from the ceiling and giant, eight-foot parabolic dishes made of stainless steel, inspired by wartime technology. For artist Laura Shill, art takes many forms. (And sometimes, no form at all other than the ephemeral experience of it.)
Based in Denver, Laura works across mediums, creating installations and performances that explore themes of isolation and connection, the self and others and the liminal space in between them all–the “presence of absence,” as she puts it. Many of these creations are props for performance–by herself and collaborators, but also the viewers themselves. Take for example Laura’s 2020 installation at MCA Denver.
“At the time, the curator knew that we were going to be in the midst of a really contentious presidential election, but we didn't know that it would coincide with a pandemic,” explains Laura. “When you're isolated, it kind of clouds your view of other people. The thing that you need the most becomes the thing you're afraid of the most, which is other people. But I think the foundation of living in a society is caring about other people, so I wondered: ‘Can we create a situation where we make that possible for people in the museum?’”
Laura invited visitors to sit across from each other and answer researcher Arthur Aron’s 36 questions that accelerate intimacy. (You may know them from the New York Times’ Modern Love Column, “The 36 Questions That Lead to Love.”) Then the pandemic arrived. “I was like, oh, what we’re proposing is now deadly. But we still wanted to do it. We felt like it was more important than ever. And so the thing that just came to me after months of experimenting with closing the distance between people in a safe way was to make a sculpture that is two 8-foot, parabolic, stainless-steel discs facing each other with their focal points aligned. Essentially, a listening vessel.”
With the creation of this vessel, visitors could sit a great distance apart and yet hear a whisper across the room. “That sculpture emerged out of necessity," Laura says. "That concept emerged out of an attempt to address a critical need in our culture, that we don't have an apparatus for. The government's not going to come in and form a task force to make you less lonely. But art can do that and be in all these places where other things don't make sense.”
Today’s Laura’s work still centers on these themes, like her latest performance at a private barn in Lafayette which called on the silicone hands she’s been casting from her own hands. She explains she’s been using them to make “simple machines” that move or touch the user in different ways.
“One of them has eight silicone hands mounted onto a unicycle turned upside down. And when you pedal it and lean into it, you can pedal it really fast and slap yourself with it, or you can slow it down and apply a really tender touch,” she says. “Now these sculptures have kind of turned into gym equipment.”
In the barn performance, Laura and her collaborator, John Lake, move through different circuits of this equipment.
“The premise is that we just kind of ignore each other so hard while we're working on ourselves with these different machine sculptures,” she explains. “And it kind of just feels like two people who are trying really, really hard and just doing everything a little bit wrong. But there’s this thing where we'll sync up at times in the choreography. So even though we're living in such a contrary way to our species, which is very social, and so many people are so very isolated, we almost can't help but fall into these natural rhythms. Almost like the way that a school of fish swims in unison or a flock of birds will murmurate through the sky.”
Laura reflects that, tied into all this is a collective grief, which, in isolation, has nowhere to go.
“We've been through a lot in these last few years,” she says. “There's been no process to recognize it or any sort of communal practice or ritual that we've performed to deal with it or acknowledge it. That's where my interest is right now; I've been trying to get my practice into a place of more performance, where there's just that little intimacy, with people gathered in rooms together. There's inherent vulnerability built into that.”
To view her work and learn more about upcoming events, visit LauraLeeShill.com.