Installation at the University of Rochester

Laura Ferguson Artwork from the Collection of Linda S. Margolin and Barnett R. Parker

A collection of my drawings and prints is on longterm view at the Miner Library of the University of Rochester Medical School.

Linda Margolin and Barnett Parker have loved my work and supported it as collectors for many years.  Linda is an artist herself: she paints abstractly and draws from her imagination. As an educator with a masters degree in Art Therapy and Creative Development from Pratt Institute, she uses the creative process to engage students in learning, no matter what subject is being studied.  Barnett is a Professor of Health Care Strategy and Planning whose passion for boundary-crossing approaches led him to appreciate the art-science aspect of my work.  He is an alumnus of UR, an appreciator of its “rich history of inter-departmental collaboration,” and has endowed a professorship in interdisciplinary studies that link business with healthcare.

The Miner Library is a place where med students and health professionals “gather daily to study, attend classes, socialize, connect, reflect, and recharge” – and now a place where my work can inspire their creativity and help them visualize the body and its anatomy through an artist’s eyes.

Laura’s artist’s statement for the Linda Margolin and Barnett Parker Collection at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

Floating in water is where my body feels suspended, almost weightless, and the effort of moving is so easy and balanced and graceful as to seem effortless.  That’s the feeling I try to keep with me [when I’m moving through the world], and it’s the feeling I want my art to have: aware of pain but transcending it.

When disability made it hard for me to be out moving through the world, I turned to drawing, finding beauty in a curving spine and exploring the connections between pain, consciousness, and creativity.  Asymmetry at my body’s core engages me with the workings of bones, muscles, nerves, and senses. I ground my work in movement practice and anatomical reality, drawing from skeletons and cadaver dissections in the anatomy lab and from 3D medical images of my body made for the purpose of art.

My “floating colors” process imbues my work with the dynamics of water, fluidity and flow.  Drops of oil paint, floating on water, spread out to reveal their inner structure as if magnified under a microscope lens.  For someone whose physical life is constricted and whose range in the world is limited, this sense of an inward opening is wonderfully liberating.  I work from the inside out to evoke the textures of real flesh and bone: a sensual take on anatomy, a reclaiming of the inner landscape.  I find a world I can marvel at and never get to the end of, a cosmos of infinitely unfolding detail.

As an artist in the world of medicine, I spent twelve years as Artist in Residence in the Master Scholars Program in Humanistic Medicine at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine.  My innovative drawing class for med students inspired the book Art & Anatomy: Drawings (University of California Medical Humanities Press, 2018).  My drawings and prints have been shown in galleries and museums in New York and around the country, and featured in major exhibitions on art and medicine including “Humans Being” at the Chicago Cultural Center, and “Beyond the X-ray” at the Boston Museum of Science.  My work is represented in many corporate, private, and public collections including the National Library of Medicine and the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.