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Nottingham Trent University   2008/2009

Laura McCafferty

I am a Nottingham based artist using cotton, screenprint and hand stitch to create illustrative reportage two dimensional artwork. An early preoccupation with the elderly in my final year of art college was my first attempt to grasp and capture something before it vanished. There is an ongoing fixation with humans and how we react within a particular environment and the effect a place has on our behaviour. The visual recording of human interaction combined with craft based techniques has had significant impact on the defining of my practice.

I graduated from Nottingham Trent University in 2003 with a first class honours degree in Decorative Arts and since then have been creating large and small scale artworks for exhibition, commission and illustration. My work has appeared in the international press and I have travelled to Japan, North America and Italy to exhibit.

Over the past couple of years the scale of my work has been growing. I find this both a challenging and exciting phase in my work. My aim is to build a body of 10-15 intricate artworks- I am working on number three. This is a big undertaking of time as each piece involves- research, photography, drawing, material sourcing, cutting, applique, screenprint and hand stitch.

It would be a fantasic opportunity to utilise some of the resources of the university to carry out some of the more diificult stages in the work. Printing, stretching and photographing all under one roof would make this project feasible and on the way I will have the chance to engage with tutors and students to exchange knowledge and information. I have other ideas of new ways of working in terms of scale, performance, audience participation and digital printing that I think will be fed by the experience.