Laurel Gallagher is a visual artist and process-based researcher working across painting, participatory practice, public commission, and academic collaboration.
This practice produces knowledge from within specific, embodied experience—through change, through making, and through collaboration with materials, places, and people. It exists in symbiosis with life as a mother, carer, and community builder.
What follows is a series of processes. Together, they form an ongoing inquiry into what it means to produce knowledge from within a life—and alongside the lives of others.
Process 01 | Western Australia | 2011–2013
Question Can the conditions of displacement create new forms of connection?
Materials Paper, cardboard, found imagery, acrylic paint, canvas.
Process Studies of place, compositional collages, paintings made alongside young children and within international mothers’ groups, following a move to Western Australia.
Learning Female relationships are structural to creative practice.
Returning to the UK, the conditions that had enabled relational making with international communities of mothers fell away. In these conditions, the practice turned inward.
The next question became: what does the subconscious surface when it is given materials and left to work alone?
Process 02 | Feral Girl | 2013–2015
Question What does the subconscious know that the conscious cannot reach?
Materials Fashion and interior magazines, acrylic on canvas.
Process Compositional collages. Painting in solitude while a new baby slept or fed.
Learning The subconscious is a collaborator.
This work was exhibited in a local cafe as part of a series of portraits of other-wordly women and wild animals in the same style.
A growing network of creatives formed around the work, alongside conversations with arts organisations about the conditions in Stoke-on-Trent and how the practice might operate within them.
Access to overlooked land in the city for creative projects became possible.
The next question became: if this was your place, what would happen here?
Process 03 | Feral Spaces | 2016–2019
Question If this was your place, what would happen here?
Materials Brownfield land, found materials, time, openness.
Process Open, child-led workshops on rewilded brownfield land in Stoke-on-Trent. Facilitation rather than direction. A growing web of children, mothers, artists, academics, and funders drawn to the same overlooked land.
Learning Process-led enquiry generates knowledge that academia, funders, and communities recognise as meaningful. Co-created with researchers, participants, and the more-than-human environment, that knowledge produces new understanding and opportunities that neither art nor research could reach alone.
As this practice evolved it grew into Urban Wilderness CIC, co-founded with Isla Telford and Jenny Harper. The organisation followed the needs of people and place, delivering large scale events and town centre regeneration. My process-led practice stayed in the wild.
The next question became: what does the body know that the mind cannot reach?
Process 04 | Entanglement | 2020–2023
Question What does the body know that the mind cannot reach?
Materials Cold water, oil bars, large-scale oil on canvas, breath, female company.
Process Cold water swimming as somatic ritual producing creative clarity. Immediate mark-making after immersion. Large-scale paintings repeating the somatic movements of water through gesture and mark.
Learning The body is the first site of knowing.
Time spent with women cold water swimming produced shared liminal experiences—states of vulnerability, endurance, and attention. These moments began to extend beyond the personal, opening into a collaborative inquiry.
The next question became: what does care look like as a public act?
Process 05 | The Norns Collective | 2022–2023
Question What does care look like as a public act?
Materials Cold water, warm clothing, wild spaces, female attention.
Process Durational performance developed from a cold water swimming residency in North Wales with collaborators Isla Telford and Jenny Harper. Women took turns to rest while others kept watch. One public performance took place on Castlefield Viaduct, Manchester—in silence, without explanation.
Learning Care is a political act. Rest in public is a radical proposition. Female attention can transform a space without explanation.
Following a period of acute family crisis, my role shifted into full-time care. I left my role as co-director of Urban Wilderness CIC. The loss was both practical and relational — a disconnection from collaborators, from shared momentum, and from a way of working that had been collectively held. In these conditions, the practice could not rely on people in the same way.
The next question became: can materials, rather than people, become collaborators?
Process 06 | Craft as Care | 2024–Ongoing
Question Can materials, rather than people, become collaborators?
Materials Fabric, river, ocean, and lake water, natural dyes, paint.
Process Fabric soaked in rivers, oceans, and lakes to see what it would hold and how those traces could be captured. Fabric is bound and formed by hand into three-dimensional forms. Over time this became a ritual — a physical grounding practice during a period of intense caring responsibility, offering a form of self-care and reconnection with the self. That ritual is now extending outward through workshops and conversations, opening into broader concerns around parent carers and environmental sustainability.
Learning Material can be a collaborator — holding, responding, and returning something in place of what people once gave the practice. That exchange became a form of care in itself.
Repeating this ritual, again and again, revealed something else: the moment of the fabric meeting water and body was not only material research. It was also an image — a collaborative action between body, fabric, and water that could be captured and stand alone.
The next question became: what does the practice reveal when the moment of encounter itself is captured?
Process 07 | Body, fabric, water | 2026–Ongoing
Question What does the practice reveal when the moment of encounter itself is captured?
Materials Fabric, water, body, breath.
Process Body and fabric enter the rivers and lakes of Staffordshire together — breath, cold, and physical sensation active throughout. Nothing is choreographed. Water, fabric, and body respond to one another; the self-portrait records that exchange as it happens.
Learning Materials are not passive. Water, fabric, body and breath are active collaborators in what the work becomes.
This is a living practice — one that welcomes each new phase of life as a source of knowledge rather than an obstacle to it. The commitment is not to a body of work. It is to the inquiry itself: to making and doing alongside others, to the moments of connection that only emerge through process, and to staying open to what the next conditions will ask.
FERAL STATE 