Laurent Labourmène

Graduate Certificate of Visual Art

For the late Caribbean poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant ‘the imaginary is all the ways a culture has of perceiving and conceiving of the world. Hence every human culture will have its own particular imaginary’. My practice is driven by a fascination with how we might transform our personal and collective imaginary at a time when it is dominated by a pathologically short attention span. A 270 million year-old fossilised insect wing, the last recorded voice of a now extinct bird, an iconic photograph taken of Earth from space, the dawn chorus of a Gondwana-era rainforest and a cinema marquee are just some of the things that have lent material to the process of exploring this territory for me. The works I’ve developed this year engage sound, text, printmaking, film, found objects, installation and time as agents for inviting us to consider and care for the long-term.