Laura Sharp Wilson is a painter, sculptor, installation and public artist living in Salt Lake City, Utah. The artist designed a terrazzo floor titled, “Thread, Trail, Rope and Yarn” for the Eccles Theater. This state of the art performance space that will host traveling broadway productions as well as local dance and theatrical productions. The new Eccles Theater designed by Pelli Clarke Pelli architects opens in October. Wilson’s painting “Stew, Fuss and Whine Assembly Line” appears on the current edition of Epoch published by Cornell University. This summer her work was included in the LA Artcore Exhibition and Arts at the Port in Anacortes, WA, curated by Barbara Shaiman. Her work is currently included in the 10” x 10” x 10” Tieton Exhibition in Tieton, Washington. The artist will have a solo exhibition of new paintings at McKenzie Fine Art in New York in January 2017. Laura Sharp Wilson received a BFA in fine art from Carnegie Mellon University, served as an apprentice at the Fabric Workshop and completed her MFA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Laura Sharp Wilson’s work is an amalgamation of abstraction, textile design, knot formations and fantastical botanical structures. Growing up in the 1970’s and 1980’s abstraction seemed the definition of contemporary art. When Bill McKibben’s “End of Nature” was published in 1989 the artist began introducing botanical forms as a way of empathizing with and empowering nature. In her late 20’s, the artist felt her art making needed a specific application and I turned to creating surface pattern design for textiles. Working with fabric inspired imagery of threads and tangled skeins and delineated knots. The artist's mature body of work utilizes all these influences to create terrains and compositions exploring our relationship with the natural world.