Laura Dutton

Artist Q&A

"My relationship to the wider world comes from a belief that all people are connected to one another and we are all connected to our planet and all other organisms we share our home with. The health of our planet is deeply rooted and mirrored within our own experiences and bodies".

When did you start making (Visual art/other) and why?

I have always been a maker - whether that has been drawing, painting, printmaking, cooking, gardening, sewing, or looking after a family and everything that entails. Each of these ways of making, throughout my life, have been small acts of love and come from a need to create and nurture.

I studied Fine Art (printmaking specialism) at UWE many years ago and have had a career as an art teacher in a secondary school for over 25 years. Teaching is intense and throughout much of this time, I have been left with very little time for making my own work. Along the way though I have learnt a huge amount about art and people, and it has been very rewarding. I love working with young people and I hope I have given some of the students I have worked with a bit of enthusiasm for art and for the incredible world we live in. A few years ago, a particular set of circumstances arose that enabled me to have a bit more available time and space to make my own work. I started to seriously engage with my own making around seven years ago, after I inherited a small kiln and glass making equipment from a very dear friend. I am eternally grateful to her and her family for this gift. After covid I also found I could not juggle full time work with my health needs, and I reduced my working hours. This freed up more time for me, allowed me more rest time, and my studio has become a space for me to relax and create in.

I had found my medium! Glass is the most sublime material and discovering how to work with it was a delightful revelation that allowed me to make the work I wanted to and explore ideas in exciting ways. Since that point I have been making glass sculptures that are inspired by and made from weird and wonderful organisms, such as fungi and slime moulds.

For me, these organisms are symbolic and allegorical: they help me tell a story of wonder, beauty (often found in unexpected and unseen places), natural processes and anomalies, balanced with fear for the future in our Anthropocene world. They symbolise hope but also alterity and the disregarded. In my work I explore the connection between our physical bodies and metaphysical states, and those of other organisms that also inhabit our planet.

How would you describe your making process? How do you use your energy and time to produce work alongside your illness? What places and spaces do you make work in?

My making process starts when I am out walking- mainly in the woods. I was diagnosed with sarcoidosis in 2005. Sarcoidosis is an inflammatory, auto-immune related illness. While the worst of my symptoms have been over for some years, I find that stress in particular, can still trigger periods of feeling unwell. Being in the woods and making art help me to regulate myself and manage my physical and mental health. Concentrating on looking for tiny wonders of nature, and working in my studio, give me a different focus and perspective. It hushes the jangle of agitation and pacifies tension; it gives me space to breathe. I have a lovely studio at the bottom of my garden, built by my kind husband and friends and I like to work outside too. My making is a step-by-step process, and this is helpful since I can fit it into available time and around my health and energy levels.

There are several stages to the making of my sculptures and this begins when I am out walking. I take photos and collect items to make sculptures from. I then make models from my collected bits and pieces, encase the models in layers of plaster and then cast glass into the refractory moulds. This part of the process takes place in the kiln and sometimes requires up to three firings to complete. The process can go wrong at any stage, and I never know quite what the result will be at the end. The demoulding of the sculptures is exciting and nerve-wracking as I gradually reveal what has been produced. After this the sculptures must be ‘cold-worked’, when the sculpture is finished by cutting, grinding, and polishing.

At the cold-working stage I try to find a balance between cleaning up the sculpture and leaving behind the imperfections and mistakes. I am not in the business of making perfect, flawless glass sculptures and the contaminations, disruptions and unexpected alignments of the process often express my ideas better than if I were to aim for a highly finished piece. This whole process often takes me many months from start to finish.

In my work I explore the connections between our bodies, our health and the health of our world. Immune systems, relationships, disruptions and anomalies are all at play.

Above: Daldinia Concentrica King Alfreds. Glass sculpture (2026).

Right: Morchella Morel. Glass sculpture (2026)

What inspires you? Books, films, art, podcasts etc. Recently or in the past.

I have always loved being outside - being in nature. As a child I read The Earthsea Chronicles by Ursula K. Le Guin. I was completely captivated by it and have re-read it recently, along with other books by this amazing author. I love the connection that the main character Ged has with nature and the way that magic and invisible forces interplay with the characters and plot. Ursula K Le Guin uses the tropes of science fiction and fantasy to explore deep philosophical ideas of power, responsibility, interconnection, consequences of actions, mortality, balance, and growth. Wonderful and inspiring-she shaped my way of thinking from an early age.

Science and art inspire me; artists who work simultaneously within these two spheres especially. The works of Ernst Haeckel, Robert Hooke and Karl Blossfeldt are wonderful. All of these made the most exquisite works of natural forms and creatures. They made work of plants, insects, sea creatures, fungi and lichens, often using innovative technologies to support their making. The original definition of “ecology” is from Ernst Haeckel, who defined ecology as the study of the relationship of organisms with their environment.

Discovering the glass models made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by the father and son team, Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, was an incredible “wow” moment for me. These beautiful, supremely intricate, and magnificent glass models of plants and sea creatures, are absolutely astonishing. If there ever was a sense of awe and wonder encapsulated in a piece of art, it is within these mesmerising sculptures.

Other artists that I am inspired by are Fransico Goya and Francis Bacon, for their raw and brutal depictions of what it can be to exist as a human in times of darkness. Both artists also recognised that beauty and ugliness are subjective and are intertwined; that these supposed polarities can be viewed as aspects of each other. Mat Collishaw is a contemporary artist who I admire very much, as he explores the current conditions of the world in relation to collapsing environments and how we as humans are enmeshed within this. He asks us to question the actions and behaviours that have brought us to a point of ecological collapse.

Mat Collishaw

More recently I have discovered a multitude of passionate mycologists, naturalists, ecologists and macro photographers who take photographs of fungi, slime moulds, lichens and miniscule creatures that exist alongside us, without us even noticing them most of the time. These artists, scientists and activists are shining a light on the small wonders of our planet, that usually stay on the fringes of our consciousness. Some of the best of these artists and naturalists that I have found are Barry Webb @barrywebbimages, Alison Pollack @marin_mushrooms, Jamie Rosencrans @this_forest_floor, and Sarah Lloyd @sarah.lloyd.tasmania. I would highly recommend following any of these on Instagram and there are many more that I have not mentioned or yet discovered.

How would you describe your relationship to the wider world?

“In nature nothing exists alone" - Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (1962)

I am currently reading The beginning comes after the end - Notes on a World of change by Rebecca Solnit (2026). On the inside sleeve of the book, it says; "At the heart of this rising world view (that she explores in the book) is the idea of interconnection, with it’s understanding of the interdependence and symbiotic relationships within nature and among humans”.

My relationship to the wider world comes from a belief that all people are connected to one another and we are all connected to our planet and all other organisms we share our home with. The health of our planet is deeply rooted and mirrored within our own experiences and bodies. In my work I explore the connections between our bodies, our health and the health of our world. Immune systems, relationships, disruptions and anomalies are all at play. My relationship with the world naturally centres around my family and people that I love, know and interact with. As a species we are doing untold damage to our planet, other creatures and ourselves. I find this very upsetting and very often despair of our wanton destruction. However, I firmly believe that hope is key for our ultimate survival and I am very heartened by the groundswell of activism, thinking and action that inspires us to have the courage to face our challenges and work towards a better future for all.

Being part of the Deserters project has been absolutely brilliant, and I have loved every minute of it. I love collaborating with people who have a common aim, and it has given me the chance to share ideas and my work with so many interesting people and artists. It has given me the confidence and space to develop my work further, and I have found the whole experience exhilarating, as well as deeply moving.

I am going to end with thanks and a quote by the poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman:

“Wonder is the heaviest element in the periodic table of the heart. Even a tiny piece of it can stop time.”