Spotlight artist Laura Footes
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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.
About the champion
Dame Tracey Emin DBE RA’s art is characterised by a profound sense of disclosure, drawing inspiration from her life experiences to create works that span various mediums, including painting, neon, drawing, video, installation, photography, needlework, and sculpture. In her candid and, at times, brutally honest pieces, Emin reveals her hopes, humiliations, failures, and successes. Her work possesses an immediacy and often sexually provocative nature, firmly situating her within the tradition of feminist discourse.
Emin’s paintings, monoprints, and drawings delve into complex personal states and concepts of self-representation, employing distinctly expressionist styles and themes. Born in London in 1963, Emin studied at Maidstone College of Art and the Royal College of Art, London. In 2007, she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale and was elected a Royal Academician in the same year. In 2011, Emin was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. In June 2024, King Charles III honored her as Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire for her contributions to the visual arts. Emin currently resides and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, UK.