bio & artist statement
Laura Jane Hegarty is a visual artist and researcher whose practice investigates a varying formula of light, time and touch, working predominantly with cyanotype, photography, and installation.
She is currently based between Edinburgh and Athens, completing an MA in Contemporary Philosophy/Philosophy of Science (2026) at the National Kapodistrian University of Athens, following her MA in Fine Art and Art History (2024) at the University of Edinburgh.
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Using light sensitive materials as an intermediary to record varios processes, the acts, rituals or otherwise are the work, and what remains are a kind of after image made of their light and time.
Experimenting with both naturally occurring cycles like the tidal and solar, or patterns of people and everyday behaviours of community, often graphs and other logical methods are starting forms toward finding ways to document or keep these everyday phenomen. Her outcomes are situated somewhere between art, science, and play, where making functions as a method of thinking, testing material hypotheses toward translating duration into something physical.
Her wider research is grounded in the body and the sense of touch; looking at light, time and touch as experiential building blocks and attending to the temporal entanglement of feeling, remembering, and imagining from within a body. Particularly interested in softly visceral somatic sensations, such as seeing the movement of a gentle breeze through sunlit curtains, remembering the warm touch of skin-to-skin, or the stillness of the passing of a restful hour, her research looks to further understand how the body touches or feels at a distance - across time as well as across physical space.
The reversibility between the touching and the touched in Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the flesh consistently informs her approach in experimenting and understanding a viewer’s embodied implication within an artwork rather than their detached observation of it. This is held alongside Irigaray’s phenomenology of light as texture and caress, and broader engagements with queer and feminist phenomenologies that resist universalising the body, attending instead to the multiplicity and situatedness of lived experience. Bringing these frameworks into a wider dialogue of philosophy of science, and her own process of material experimentation, her research asks how art and artmaking might enact, rather than merely represent, perceptual and somatic possibilities.
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