Laura Bullock
Degree: MFA Fine Art
University: Duncan of Jordanstone School of Art & Design
Graduation Year: 2025
New Blood Art Commentary
Laura Bullock’s work unfolds like an architecture of memory. Using materials drawn from both the structural and the domestic - plaster, marble powder, aluminium dust, insulation paper, brass connectors - she builds quiet, monochrome surfaces that hover between solidity and erasure. Patterns repeat, doors reappear, fragments of façades are pressed into relief. What looks at first like minimal abstraction soon reveals itself as the residue of lived space, an emotional blueprint imprinted into matter.
Her practice is deeply attuned to Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and in particular his reflections on thresholds — a doorway, a curtain, or a wall: protective or excluding, sheltering or divisive, poised between intimacy and estrangement, security and exposure.
Forms, lines, or materials are seemingly repeated which at first glance might suggest sameness, but in fact, each repetition carries a slight variation - a shift in pressure, texture, or weight. These variations mirror memory itself: recalled again and again, never identical, always altered in the act of remembering. Her process of repeating thus echoes the fragility of how memory works. Because her work is quiet, minimal, and monotone, it carries a restraint that sharpens rather than diminishes the emotional undertone. Each piece seems to hover between being there (a solid, material object) and slipping away (a fragile, dissolving impression), embodying the charged tension of poignant dissolution.
Artist Statement
I am an artist based in Edinburgh but I spent my formative years in the Fenlands of Lincolnshire. Interweaving personal history with material investigation, I explore emotional blueprints, transferred through generational value systems. Through a meticulous, inter-disciplinary approach, including installation, printmaking and sculpture, I sensitively reflect on my lived experience of familial estrangement through the fragile architecture of inherited memory.
Contemplating Gaston Bachelard’s ‘The Dialectics of Outside and Inside’, from his book The Poetics of Space, I analyse the interplay of interior and exterior through the phenomenology of material histories. Incorporating jewellery, elements of domestic décor, and utilitarian materials in a rhythmical response to space, I aim to highlight the complex and delicate underpinnings of the psychological patterns we impart. Utilising my sensitivities to intuitively explore repetition as a method to expose difference rather than sameness.
The researching of artists including Matt Rugg and Tove Storch, alongside the experimental visual scores of Cornelius Cardew and John Cage, informs the site-responsive nature of my practice and my consideration towards materiality.
Seeking to underscore the preciousness and precarity of emotional inheritance, I transform everyday details into poetic markers of presence and absence, which bear the weight of the histories we inherit and the histories we choose not to hand down.
I was awarded a John Kinross Scholarship by the Royal Scottish Academy (2025) and will be travelling to Florence in October to begin a body of research in relation to my work from my MFA.
Competitions, Prizes & Awards
(2025) John Kinross Scholarship - awarded by the Royal Scottish Academy
(2024) Leith School of Art Contemporary Art Practice Prize - sponsored by Cass Art
(2024) Leith School of Art Printmaking Prize - sponsored by Karl Stern (2024)
(2023) Leith School of Art Outstanding Work Prize – Fine Art
(2025) The Duncan of Jordanstone Masters Prize - MFA Fine Art