Laura Hills is a UK based artist working with installation, sculpture and wall-based forms. Her practice explores materiality and our experience of space through the use of sewing patterns, paper, thread, wax and framing structures. Her work considers the relationship between surface and internal and external space. Fragmentation, shifting light and interrupted lines and patterns create layered works that exist between image, object and architecture and are ambiguous in their reading, inviting viewers to slow down and linger.
Hills graduated with an MA Fine Art (Distinction) at UCA Canterbury in 2023, having returned to her art practice eight years ago. Inclusion in recent exhibitions includes Epigeal at Unit 2 Gallery, St Leonards, Sculpture in the Home at the Royal Society of Sculptors, Apparatus I and II at Arthub Studios and Transformation Paper at Haus De Papiers Gallery, Berlin. Her work has also been exhibited at Dora House and Arthouse Wakefield, alongside group exhibitions and collaborative projects around the UK.
She also participated in an AA2A Residency at York St John University (2023–24) and received the Gilbert Bayes Award from the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2024.
The Gilbert Bayes Award 2024 Winners’ Exhibition
Excerpt from essay by Clemency Cooke of Cooke Latham Gallery February 2025
In two unexpected locations within Dora House hang the contour hugging
works of Laura Hills. Site-specific, they are made of wax, frames, tissue
paper and sewing patterns. These beguiling materials nod perhaps
to the works of Heidi Bucher, however their structure reveals Hills as
both a musician and composer. There is a rhythm and fluency to the
compositions; a musical preoccupation with infinite possible arrangements
emerging from basic units. The ghosts of the sewing patterns from which
they are made have the feel of architectural or industrial blueprints,
underlining the artist’s preoccupation with space; her desire to play with
the perception, orientation and experience of the viewer.