Wasteland/Wanderland is an immersive installation comprised of woodcut and linocut prints adhered to the gallery walls that depict children as the explorers of a beautiful, yet dystopian setting. Navigating a tangled landscape filled with genetically modified and invasive species, the figures are presented as both tenacious and vulnerable. Drawing upon archetypes from children’s literature, this narrative installation captures an experience of childhood as it relates to place: Place as geography, place within a family structure, and the interiority that forms one’s sense of identity.

Laura Peturson is a northern Ontario artist with a practice situated in printmaking, drawing, and painting. Her work uses narrative to explore themes of childhood, gender, and place. She is interested in the ways the domestic spaces we inhabit as children form our identity and a conception of our place in relation to family, geography, and nature. Laura’s influences include Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints, and the work of 19^th century artists such as Mary Cassatt, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and William Merritt Chase.

Laura’s recent work has been exhibited at Alberta Printmakers Gallery, Flowers Gallery (New York, NY), The Thunder Bay Art Gallery, White Water Gallery (North Bay, ON), and Idea Exchange (Cambridge, ON). Laura teaches printmaking, painting, and drawing at Nipissing University.