The Image as a Felt Thing
Laura Rosengren
Installation image from the 2025 MFA Grad exhibition Fracture, Fold, Fray. Michael O’Brien Gallery, Vancouver, BC. Works: (l-r) Housewife, Blue House and Folding Laundry.
The paintings for this project contain open-ended stories. They are suspended from shelf-like brackets and hang loosely away from the wall, resembling the pages of a script or book. In my work, I’m not primarily interested in telling a singular story, but in evoking an affective and tactile response through the multiple small recognitions, repulsions and sensory engagements found in the interplay between images and materials. By using felt, fabric, and other domestic accumulations alongside paint, I attempt to both rupture and repair the skin of motherhood narratives.
Container
76 x 54”
2025
Oil paint, fabric dye, chalk, needle-felted wool, synthetic felt, canvas and wood.
Using domestic materials and processes in artmaking is a form of monstering within my practice. I employ repetitive care gestures—such as washing and stitching—as methods for making paintings, expanding the vocabulary of painting beyond the brushstroke. Needle felting, in particular, mimics a certain experience of motherhood for me. It is slow, soft, imprecise, as well as sharp and disruptive. It gets under the skin and pierces the surface of the image over and over.
Folding Laundry
2025
77” x 50 x 5”
Fabric dye, gesso and acrylic paint, needle felted wool, domestic and craft scraps on unstretched canvas.
While art history often mythologizes the solitary genius and heroic gesture, and capitalist frameworks prioritize speed and novelty, I work in a home studio, often alongside my children, integrating the slow, repetitive gestures of care labour into my paintings. Collaging traditional painting materials with those drawn from craft and care work allows my practice to incorporate maternal experience and the long tactile histories of women working with their hands.
Blue House
2025
72 x 41.5” x 5”.
Fabric dye, gesso, acrylic paint, needle felted wool on canvas.
Drawing, tracing, and transcribing images allows for an ambivalent knowing of images. The repeated process of painting in and washing out leaves traces of the struggle to both reveal and conceal. The materials and processes accumulate, making the narrative images underneath them ambiguous and slows recognition. Flat images also begin to possess a different presence through materials such as felt and fibre. I am interested in how recognition is embedded, interrupted or distilled by the sensory world of repetition and slowly made objects.
Housewife
2025
73 x 48.5” x 5 (on the wall),
28 x 40” (on the floor),
Fabric dye, gesso and acrylic paint, needle felted wool, domestic and craft scraps on unstretched canvas (wall)
Needle felted wool, domestic and craft scraps (floor).
Colouring Pages
The Yellow Walk
20 x 16″
Editioned archival pigments prints with varied felt, paint and/or pastel, 2025
Top row l-r below: Blue String, Hearts Black Hole, Pink Feather
Bottome row l-r: Hammock, Bricks and Rug, Strategy
