Work

5 themes inform my practice:

1. The primacy of symbolic and non-discursive knowledge
2. Reactivation instead of reconstruction
3. Meaning at the margins
4. Intuitive and embodied artistic practice
5. The image as a primary carrier of knowledge and memory

If I were to distill my practice into a single question, it would be this:

In a time when meaning is often fractured or flattened and sensory overload eclipses inner perception, can markmaking reinstate symbolic imagination as a valid mode of knowing, reorienting our relationship to the environment, the ancestral, and the yet-to-be-revealed?






The Aperture


My work emerges as a disciplined attempt to access the superconscious through a deliberately narrowed aperture.  Rather than remaining passively open to the infinite, I choose to engage through a focused point of entry, refining my ability to interpret and not merely absorb. This decision marks a shift from mystification to experimentation, from passivity to creative precision. Let’s call it an aperture

Experimenting with media


I am not following the pursuit of a singular, resolved artwork. Instead, I am generating a living body of gestures, forms, and signals—each a speculative fragment in a larger inquiry into what it means to be human. The aim is not to create finalities but to generate velocity and vitality. Creativity here is not a perfected output, but a spiritual practice, an ongoing energetic state. It is not finished and set aside.


Painting as a metaphysical engine


In this practice, paintings are not objects but proposals—portals that open space, collapse time, and reorganize perception. They simulate truths we cannot otherwise articulate with language or linear thought. Painting functions as a metaphysical engine: it duplicates, echoes, remembers. It transforms the formless into form, the invisible into trace.






For longform lovers:


My practice is a long-term world-building exercise that has been unfolding for the past decade. Across painting, encaustic wax, drawing, and sitespecific installation, I have been developing a symbolic system that playfully operates as an alternative world governed by embodied and sensory forms of knowledge. This world is not constructed through narrative or text, but through symbols, materials, and repeated gestures that accumulate meaning over time. 

At the core of my practice is an interest in knowledge that cannot be fully articulated or archived. I work against a Western-centric understanding of knowledge as written, rational, and informational, and instead engage with forms of knowing that reside in the body, the subconscious, and deep-time collective memory.

These are forms of intelligence shaped by environment, repetition, carried across millennia through adaptation. The symbols that populate my work, spirals, constellations, biomorphic forms, and recurring feline figures emerge intuitively through sustained making and material engagement. Over time, these forms have developed internal relationships, interacting across works as elements within a shared symbolic ecology. The resulting world appears playful and intuitive, but subtly allows questions about transformation, death, rebirth, and continuity. 

Material experimentation is central to how this world takes shape. Encaustic wax plays a key role due to its unpredictability. Working with wax requires constant adjustment to heat, timing, and resistance. The material trains the body to respond instead of to plan, producing knowledge through action. Pigment, metal, abrasion, and surface interventions extend this logic, placing materials under stress to observe what persists, mutates, or disappears. In this way, the studio becomes a site where knowledge is generated somatically rather than intellectually. 

Living in Abu Dhabi has fundamentally shaped my approach. Across geological time, the desert landscape has transitioned from fertile environments to arid terrain, leaving behind rock formations, vegetation patterns, and material traces shaped by pressure, heat, erosion. These processes mirror the conditions I create in the studio, as both operate through exposure and adaptation. My practice is also informed by proximity to local forms of embodied knowledge that circulate outside formal institutions: craft traditions, recipes, oral histories, and everyday acts of adaptation shaped by climate and environment. I do not seek to represent these practices; Instead, they reinforce my interest in knowledge as something enacted, shared, and transmitted through doing rather than documentation. 

Alongside studio work, I am expanding this symbolic world through LUX, an evolving body of shared references, and visual research developed through conversations, studio visits, and exchanges with other artists and creatives in the local community. This growing constellation functions as a living system, shaped by proximity and dialogue.











© 2025 LAURA XENOPOL. All rights reserved
Survival of the Myth, more or less disguised, in the modern world.