LAURA MANZANO ARIAS
Adjacent Views

Laura Manzano Arias

Laura Manzano Arias is a mixed-media collage artist living in Bright’s Grove. She is a teacher with a degree in visual arts and French from Western. She enjoys participating in local art shows in order to stay involved in the local art community and has been granted several awards locally over the last few years.

Her most recent artwork layers old books, watercolour, acrylic and sewing tissue patterns into mixed media abstract collages that explore positive and negative space as well as balance and texture. “I am trilingual, and I think my knowledge and experience with languages has subconsciously inspired my artwork ever since university. I found some old sewing patterns in a thrift store and was intrigued by the complicated technical language that the sewing patterns had on their delicate tissue surface. This language seemed foreign to me, as a non-sewer, which made me want to investigate further.” explains Manzano Arias. “Ever since then I have been interested in the technical language of the sewing patterns, their lines, shapes and spaces are seen as abstract to me. My goal has been to explore and create a visual relationship between human and organic form, structure and composition with the code language of sewing.” She begins each piece by choosing a sewing pattern to create her composition and projects onto the paper surface. Then intuitively begins to build and layer the collage using images and textures that resonate with her.

​In her upcoming exhibition Adjacent Views, Manzano Arias will be showcasing her most recent collection of mixed media collages, many of them created within the last year in her home studio here in Bright’s Grove and at an artist residency that she attended on Manitoulin Island in the summer of 2020. Her recent mixed media collages evoke imagery of life, landscape and figure. “I am very excited to be exhibiting this body of work locally beside that of Laura Kreviazuk’s. I think our artwork compliments each other in that we both use line, space and form to lay out our (abstract) compositions but we approach scale and medium very differently which makes for a nice contrast." ​

Facebook: Laura Arias
Instagram: @lauramanzanoarias

I Shall Be Homeless
Mixed Media 13"x17"

Morning Light
Mixed Media 15"x22.5"

Embrace
Mixed Media 11"x14.5"

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Laura at home in front of one of her large acrylic paintings – April 2020.

Laura working on artwork at a Residency on Manitoulin Island – July 2020.