The Polish visual artist and photographer Laura Makabresku considers the surrealistic element in her art spiritual. Surrealism stands as the basis of every art piece, upon which all emotions, thoughts, etc. are mounted. When creating, Laura turns most often in the direction of myths and fairy tales, and to the extent possible moves away from the real, daily world.
“I don’t create documentaries, I rather try to give birth to some reality of a possible kind for which we are probably longing, which we desire, which evokes emotions, sometimes frightens, which fills some unnamed absence, lack of something or someone, giving accession to new experiences which are unknown in the regular, daily life. From such experiences new consciousness’ arise.” the artist remarks.
In Laura’s work, the photo is never a closed set, even though its form could indicate that. The photo “goes on” in the mind and emotions of the viewer, it changes him, this is why creativeness is also a great deal of responsibility for other people.
Makabresku is an integral part of the frame which she creates in her head. In the pictures she is very pale, almost transparent, suspended on a thin line of life and death, unable to decide what dimension of existence she is supposed to choose. She is still somewhere in between.
Neither is she here on earth nor there, in the beyond, in the afterlife. Sometimes she resembles a limp nymph or a forest elf who fell into a deep sleep and does not want to wake up yet. She nestles in with forest animals, which fall asleep with her in a sensitive, almost intimate embrace.
An important element of Makabresku’s works becomes also the human body – with its beauty, weaknesses, limitations and illnesses. In the artist’s pictures most often does it function as dead, still withstanding to the nature that wants to take possession of it – the body in these photos is not subject to any posthumous degradation, which may raise abject disgust. But sometimes it is also bruised, scratched, tired, it is a body on which giant spiders softly tread, a body connected to a drip, from which a mysterious substance, supposed to revive it, is filtered into its veins.
Makabresku approaches the body with her lens as closely as possible, the body, whose ontological status is still indefinite, trying to grasp its essence and meaning. It is also a kind of photo-biography of the artist’s unrestrained imagination, keeping her on the border of two, or even several worlds.
(Note: See more of surreal photography works by Laura Makabresku here).
