Laura Mahnke is an artist and writer reflecting on human emotions and yearnings, memories, and the present time through sculpture, performance, and poetry. Her individual and collaborative work has been shown, among others, at Vorfluter, Berlin, Modos Dever, Leipzig, Dos Mares, Marseille, and various venues in Hamburg such as Kunsthaus, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Frappant Galerie, Barlachhalle K, MOM art space, and Museum for Arts and Crafts.
She is a founding member of the feminist curatorial collective Cake&Cash, and participated in numerous publications and podcasts published by, and symposia held by Künstlerhaus Lauenburg, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, and Kunstverein in Hamburg. She is also a trained potter and mother of one child.

Artist Statement:

I am a woman with a non-academic background and I started studying Fine Arts in my late twenties being a mother of one. I was active in antifascist movements and educational politics long before I knew I would become an artist. Everything I did before entering the academic art world shapes and enriches my artistic practice: motherhood, feminism, punk, community building, and low-budget decadence.

My work focuses on the human body and flesh, memories, (inner) landscapes, and the present time. I am fascinated and deeply moved by emotions like rage, yearning, and shame. I explore these themes through Haptic Research – by touching and feeling actual matter, precisely clay, porcelain, charcoal, graphite, and metal oxides. My works’ sap of life is a radically left yet romantic world view that infuses my artistic travels between antipatriarchal longings, and observations of the dystopias we are living in. I might address this rather literally through poetry I call Raw Writing, that consists of Écriture Automatique or autotheoretic essays. Through Poetic Abstraction I enable myself to delve into wider, unconscious, desire-driven areas. Both poles are connected by an intuitive way of working: a working by heart.

I consider other artists, musicians, and writers a greatly cherished source of inspiration and wisdom. These are, among others: Patti Smith, Tia Blake, Bridget St John, Joan Baez, Nick Drake, Annie Ernaux, Sylvia Plath, Edouard Louis, Maggie Nelson, Lynda Benglis, Valie Export, Nan Goldin, Sarah Lucas (tbc.).