Laura Splan
Laura Splan is a transdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of science, technology, and culture. Her research-driven projects connect hidden artifacts of biotechnology to everyday lives through embodied interactions and sensory engagement. Her conceptually based art practice combines a wide range of media including experimental materials, digital media, and craft processes. Her biomedical themed artworks have been commissioned by The Centers for Disease Control Foundation. Her projects combining digital fabrication and textiles have been exhibited at the Museum of Arts & Design and Beall Center for Art + Technology and are represented in the collections of the Thoma Art Foundation, The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the NYU Langone Art Collection. Reviews and articles including her work have appeared in The New York Times, Discover, designboom, American Craft, and Frieze. Splan has received research funding from The Jerome Foundation and her residencies have been supported by The Knight Foundation, The Institute for Electronic Arts, Harvestworks, and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation. She has been a visiting lecturer at Stanford University teaching interdisciplinary courses including “Embodied Interfaces”, “Data as Material” and “Art & Biology”. She is a member of the New Museum’s NEW INC incubator and is collaborating with biotech laboratories to interrogate interspecies entanglements in the contemporary biomedical landscape. Her recent solo exhibitions including molecular animations and textiles made with wool from laboratory llamas include Entangled Entities (APSU’s The New Gallery) and Unraveling (BioBAT Art Space at the Brooklyn Army Terminal). Her lace virus series that includes SARS (created in 2004) have been exhibited around the world and are currently on view in the Triënnale Brugge at the location of a medieval hospital that once served plague victims. Splan lives and works in Brooklyn, New York in a building that has been both a pharmaceutical factory and a knitting factory.
