Laurie was a Canadian artist who lived in Devon in the later part of her life, whose work primarily centred on drawing. Sadly taken from us at a young age in 2023, she was heavily influenced by the natural environment in and around her family home in Devon. Laurie’s detailed drawings served as portraits of the landscape and reflections on the ever-changing surroundings of the English countryside.

Laurie studied Fine Art at the University of Calgary, later completing her B.I.D. at the University of Manitoba’s Faculty of Architecture. With over 25 years of international exhibition experience, Laurie consistently showed her work in the UK (London and Bath), Canada, and Switzerland.

Laurie said:

“I have always seen nature as a series of structures or patterns within a larger natural order – our (vertical) human presence sharing space within a wild (horizontal) landscape. Images rendered are usually places touched with memory; they make visible a ‘humanness’ I see and feel in the landscape

My work has always felt full of paradoxes sitting happily beside each other.  From lightness and darkness, emptiness and fullness, to finding the extraordinary within the ordinary. I enjoy focusing on what isn’t there; the unsolved empty space.”

Laurie’s work is represented in numerous private and corporate collections and she regularly exhibited her work internationally. In 2015, she was elected an Academician of the Royal West of England Academy (RWA).  Group exhibitions include the 2017/18 Jerwood Drawing Prize, the 2018 and 2019 Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, as well as every biannual DRAWN exhibition with the RWA.