photo credit Olivia Stier
bio
Laura Weiler is a visual artist and arts facilitator working primarily in analog and digital collage as well as mixed media. Laura combines her love of paper ephemera and design to create dynamic and unexpected images. Informed by a background in film, photography, and floral design, her compositions are both dramatic and tender, rendered with psychological layers and given vital, expressive energy.
​
Laura’s work is part of the permanent collection at The Scandinavian Collage Museum in Norway. She has been published in multiple print and online publications worldwide including editorial illustrations for Cosmopolitan, Road & Track, and Bend Magazine. Her art direction projects cover interdisciplinary ground, such as floral design for Harpo Studios, album and mural design, commercials, and films screened at the Chicago International Film Festival. She has facilitated creative experiences for public and private audiences as well as government agencies with a concentration on affordable housing.
​
​In 2021 Laura co-founded the Pacific Northwest Collage Collective to connect regional artists and celebrate collage as a medium. The PNWCC hosts open calls, and exhibitions and works closely with community-based collaborators.
​
Laura is now based in western Michigan by way of Portland, OR, and Chicago, IL. She is a member of the Portage Arts Committee and Collage Crew Kzoo. In her spare time, she enjoys exploring her home state and hanging out with her family and their slinky black cat Lucy.
artist statement
I began collaging as a means to develop a creative skill that would serve as both a therapy and catalyst for artistic growth. I am drawn to the process within collage—cutting, tearing, gluing diverse source material, and the recontextualizing of both tangible two-dimensional objects as well as elements of my own interior world onto the page. The meditative act of placement and the physicality of arranging and rearranging appeal to my desire to dismantle an existing perspective and unify seemingly disparate images, philosophies, and moods into something new.
Layering paper into playful, surreal, and surprising narratives and abstractions drive the current themes of my work. I feel inspired by the process of exploration and bring vintage paper to life by synthesizing it with rich colored paper and photographs using a modern lens. Working mainly in photomontage and antique ephemera, my collages emerge from an interdisciplinary background folding cinematic and photographic notions into the body of my work.
Influenced by collage artists Conner Dainty, Lola Dupre, Sarah Jarrett, among many others, I derive additional inspiration and fellowship from the broader collage community. I look forward to deepening my skill and creative identity through collage and other mediums.
