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 | 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.
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: Who has the right to define what counts as an outcome?
Process 03 | Feral Spaces | 2016–2019
Question Who has the right to define what counts as an outcome?
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.
Learning The open, unknown process is the point—not an obstacle to it. The tension between institutional demands for scalable, replicable outcomes and genuine transformation is a political position to be held.
As this practice evolved it grew into the arts organisation Urban Wilderness CIC, co-founded with Isla Telford and Jenny Harper. The scale and responsibility of the work intensified alongside the Covid-19 pandemic and our work became office and town centre based.
I needed to develop a practice that would keep me connected to embodied learning through making in wild spaces.
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. This fundamentally altered my capacity to participate in collective structures, sustained collaboration, and externally driven timelines and I left my role as codirector 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: what does the practice become when materials, rather than people, become active collaborators?
Process 06 | Worlding with Materials | 2024–Ongoing
Question What does the practice become when materials, rather than people, become active collaborators?
Materials Fabric, water, paint, body, reading, unstructured time.
Process Automatic drawing and expressive painting in direct conversation with new materialist and posthumanist thought. Materials and body operate as active collaborators. The body enters the work directly, looking out from within.
Learning The practice closest to truth is the one with no obligation to deliver. Materials know things the conscious mind does not.
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 