Footes was bed-bound after open bowel surgeries, and films offered a chance to escape. “Chronic illness is very alienating, it feels like you’re on an island, so since childhood I tried to do things that made me feel less isolated, such as learning other languages and learning about other people’s culture and traditions as a means to forge new and meaningful connections, and this has really influenced my art and way of seeing the world”, says Footes.

The Birmingham-born artist creates ethereal, hallucinatory scenes, wispy figures rendered with loose brushwork and softly surreal light, that evoke a precise atmosphere, the dissonance between bodies and space, the transience of being. They are ruminations from the confines of a room, invocations of “the shadows and magic of one person’s strange interior world” as the artist puts it.

Footes’ Champion for The Wick is Tracey Emin, who Footes met when she was struggling to hold down cleaning jobs, make art and manage her illness. Emin invited Footes to take a studio space at TKE in Margate, and offered a disability bursary to help support Footes make work. Emin has now curated Footes solo exhibition, A Healing Dream, opening on 17 November at Carl Freedman Gallery.

Emin said: ​​”Laura’s work takes me into another world. A ghost-like space. The unreal meeting the real the dead meeting the living. Through my mental states and the effects of my cancer. I have stepped in and out of those worlds. Laura is a true genius in presenting this twilight zone of straddling these worlds.”

Footes created the entire body of work shown at Carl Freedman at TKE Studios in Margate. It was Footes first time working in a studio, and not from her bedroom or the living space of a rented flat. It had a major impact on the work she was able to make. “In this studio I have been able to really, really paint – spread my wings fully! I am a self-taught painter so making a mess and experimenting safely is key to progress.”

Exploring themes of dysfunction and healing, the suite of paintings are an ode to the struggle, but to the learning and resilience that emerges from it – it is easy to feel the connection to Emin’s own brave and elegiac practice.

“It was not easy to get here coming from a working-class family in the Midlands with no connections to the art world, or any connections in general, as I am first generation to go to university.” Footes says. “We did not have money to finance the journey and it was hard to finance myself with jobs on the side as I was constantly hospitalised and having surgeries to maintain or treat my aggressive chronic illness, which meant losing the side jobs and being unemployed whilst in recovery.”

Footes is now able to dedicate herself fully to her art, and you can’t help feeling painting is a true vocation. “I have been extremely lucky with who I met along the way – great patrons, mentors, supporters, friends who bought work so I could pay bills and continue. Maybe my biggest personal achievement is to keep going. If you persist, then good things have a chance of happening.