LAUREL POWELL
Location:
Bakersfield, CA, USA
ARTIST BIO
Laurel Powell is a self-taught, emerging painter and printmaker whose work confronts gender, power, and identity within contemporary social frameworks. Her practice draws from personal narratives of womanhood, transforming lived experience into a vivid and unrestrained visual language.
Through Powell Gallery, she has created a space that nurtures her own practice while amplifying local and underrepresented artists through collaboration, mentorship, and creative exchange. Rooted in feminist perspectives, Powell approaches art as a means of challenging social and cultural constraints, reclaiming agency, and asserting presence.
Her work invites viewers to engage with themes of empowerment, resilience, and self reclamation, contributing to ongoing conversations about feminism, autonomy, and the power of creativity as liberation.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My practice is driven by a compulsive need to release panic. I make work to survive, to relocate what grips my body and mind so I can breathe. The canvas becomes a site of transfer, where internal pressure is pushed outward, made visible, and allowed to exist beyond me.
Creation pulls me into a heightened state of presence. I move through it on instinct and momentum, often unable to retrace the exact path that led there. Each piece sheds something: a false identity, an imposed expectation, a held tension. Through this act of release, I come into clearer focus, not as what I was taught to contain, but as what endures when containment falls away.
Recurrent themes of entrapment reflect personal and systemic forces—patriarchy, capitalism, the exhaustion of being promised a navigable world that never existed. The work does not seek resolution. It claims agency through release, honoring the beauty revealed afterward and the inevitability of becoming who we are when we no longer resist letting go.
