Laura Garcia Martin MAFA

About the Artist

Laura Garcia Martin is a Spanish/British artist based in Manchester. I have been living in England for the last 25 years.

Her work ranges from heavily painted canvases to collages and simpler, study-like illustrations and photography. She studied Fine Arts (BA Hons. in Seville, 1991-1995) and Illustration with Animation at Manchester Metropolitan University (2000-2003). She has been working and exhibiting since then, her illustrations have appeared in numerous art
magazines and books published in the UK and Spain, though she focusses mainly on painting.

Laura received First Prize for Most Outstanding Work at the Stockport Open Exhibition 2011, and has had works selected and shortlisted in numerous competitions at a national level,
including Mall Galleries in London, 2014,2015 and the Royal Cambrian Academy in Conwy,
2014.

She has exhibited individually in Sheffield, Cupula art gallery (2015) and Manchester, Everyman Gallery (2012).

"My work is focused on personal experience; it explores the different social environments in which I have been immersed throughout my lifetime. I paint from the perspective of the
outsider and in exhibiting my work, I feel art to be my first language and my mother tongue.
The artistic process is for me an autobiographical one. I am interested in how the space/body relationship is often fraught with difficulties; in how the boundaries of the space
we occupy are shown to be supportive and damaging in turn, so that we are both protected and imprisoned, framed and fragmented by them."

Laura is an elected member of MAFA (Manchester Academy of Fine Arts) and of the Neo:artists collective in Bolton and has collaborated as a CG Associate Member in Castlefield Gallery
Her current projects include a series of drawings to be included in the Didsbury Drawing celebration 2001-2021 organised by fellow artist Cecile Elstein, as well as working on the illustrations for a new poetry collection, Deep Play by Jose Maria Garcia.