Laura Marie Katriina Vuorio was born in Turku, Finland, but has lived the majority of her life in Singapore. She received her Bachelors Degree in Fine Arts (Honors) from the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts in Singapore, and is currently working as an arts teacher in Art Village in Singapore. As a practicing artist, she covers a range of mediums, including painting, drawing, and digital-media. Her work focuses on themes of perception, dealing with sexuality, body politics, disgust, and humor, which she conveys by the use of the nude female body.

Vuorio’s work deals with the dynamic manipulation of the female body in art and society, where women have remained in a constant struggle in taking control of their own sexuality, from those whom deem it for her. This conflict against man, the ideal body, and overtly sexualized media have stripped women from their right to express sexuality through their own terms, as their perception of their bodies constantly deviate between that of beauty and disgust. By asserting the presence of the female nude through her body language, eccentric size, and lewd medium, Vuorio hopes to mould the female body into a symbol of resistance, and to gain control over her own sexual character.

Vuorio attempts this by using herself as the model, a disabled dwarf whome’s unconventional size contradicts the traditional beauty ideal. These nude repetitions are seen throughout her artistic practice in various sizes, some even created to represent the artist’s actual bodily size. Through combining motifs of disgust and sexuality into various singular artworks, Vuorio aims to pervert the viewers into distorting their own standards of acceptable sexuality, where the candid perversion of our inner minds is both truthful, and ironic.

Laura will be holding her debut solo exhibition on 15 July 2016 at Merlin Gallery. Stay tuned for more information.