Laura Millard

Laura Millard is a visual artist based in Toronto. Millard’s artistic practice combines drawing, painting, and photography. Her work is concerned with contemporary representations of the landscape that reflect precarious and unstable environments impacted by climate change, and the hubris of our sense of permanence here. In recent work she has used recovered materials, such as abandoned fishing nets, to draw in the landscape, photographing these ephemeral gestures with an aerial camera.

She has done large-scale drawings on the land using a snowmobile, a salvaged driftnet, recovered fishing ropes and other objects she has encountered in various places. From aerial photographs of these ‘line drawings’, she has produced mixed media, fabric lightboxes as well as overpainted photo works on paper. In past work she has photographed drawings made from skate marks on ice and jet contrails from military airshows. From these indexical traces Millard explores the hubris of ‘making our mark’ through gesture and unexpected approaches to landscape depiction.

Laura Millard has exhibited in artist-run, commercial and public galleries across Canada and internationally; including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Windsor, Whyte Museum, Banff, WhereWhere Exhibition Space, Beijing, Doris McCarthy Gallery, University of Toronto, Glenbow Museum Calgary, Sookmyung Women’s University, Korea and St. Lawrence University Art Gallery, New York among others. She has been a visiting artist and panelist in various university and gallery settings including the Banff Centre, the University of Waterloo, the University of Victoria, the University of Western Ontario, the Mendel Art Gallery and the Art Gallery of Ontario.

An artist, writer and educator, Laura Millard is currently an Associate Professor at OCAD University. She received a BFA from NSCAD University in 1983 and an MFA from Concordia University in 1992. Millard has done several artist’s residencies including KIAC, Dawson City, Yukon, The Arctic Circle Residency, Svalbard, The Banff Centre, NSCAD University, Brucebo Studio, Sweden and Red Gate in Beijing.

For more information visit: www.lauramillard.com