Growing up in Paris, Laura-May’s mother took her to numerous museums and galleries, while her professional painter and sculptor stepmother gave her the means to start painting in her early teens. She studied art at Queen Mary University of London where she began to combine her interest in science and research with artistic practice, before studying astronomy and astrophysics at the Paris Observatory.
She has since developed a practice inspired by astrophysics, engraving, natural history and modern tattoo practice, as well as pointillism, abstract expressionism, art nouveau, the pre-raphaelites and the works of artists like Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Marie Laurencin, Henri Rousseau and Niki de St Phalle.
She was selected to exhibit a painting at the London Tate Modern in 2010 for the museum’s 10th anniversary, through the Museum of Everything. In 2017, she was invited to exhibit at New Scientist Live where she showed paintings, astrophotography and her 3D-Cosmic Entomology works. Her work has been shown internationally in galleries in London, Paris, and Los Angeles, as well as in Paris's astronomy hub "Le Monde de L'Observation".
In early 2020, she was invited by New York creative agency Yummy Colours to take part in their Concept of the Year project “Fuel on Water”, creating a work based on spectroscopy and her largest painting yet. Later that year her art was selected and featured by the Hubble Space Telescope for the telescope’s 30th anniversary. In 2021 she was featured as the painter in the music video "Fine Lines" by Derek Day. She has now created three separate large-scale works for Concept of the Year.
She has been pursuing an illustrated poetry book project, "Flora Astra" a series of cosmic floral macro imagery, as well as larger iterations of her Cosmic Entomology series.
She has since developed a practice inspired by astrophysics, engraving, natural history and modern tattoo practice, as well as pointillism, abstract expressionism, art nouveau, the pre-raphaelites and the works of artists like Joan Miró, Wassily Kandinsky, Marie Laurencin, Henri Rousseau and Niki de St Phalle.
She was selected to exhibit a painting at the London Tate Modern in 2010 for the museum’s 10th anniversary, through the Museum of Everything. In 2017, she was invited to exhibit at New Scientist Live where she showed paintings, astrophotography and her 3D-Cosmic Entomology works. Her work has been shown internationally in galleries in London, Paris, and Los Angeles, as well as in Paris's astronomy hub "Le Monde de L'Observation".
In early 2020, she was invited by New York creative agency Yummy Colours to take part in their Concept of the Year project “Fuel on Water”, creating a work based on spectroscopy and her largest painting yet. Later that year her art was selected and featured by the Hubble Space Telescope for the telescope’s 30th anniversary. In 2021 she was featured as the painter in the music video "Fine Lines" by Derek Day. She has now created three separate large-scale works for Concept of the Year.
She has been pursuing an illustrated poetry book project, "Flora Astra" a series of cosmic floral macro imagery, as well as larger iterations of her Cosmic Entomology series.
Concept of the Year
Paintings
Cosmic Entomology
Capturing fleeting moments of the universe
Nebulae, galaxies and stars are ephemeral movements of the universe - like butterflies, whose brief beauty is admired, sometimes rendered timeless by entomology, the scientific study of insects and their preservation.
Found in museums as well as in homes, hung as artworks, I was awed by entomology boxes, full of insects glistening with a thousand colours—being both science and art. Many of us have equally admired the incredible capture of larger pieces of the universe by Hubble and other telescopes for the past thirty years.
Mirrors, their build and modernization, have played an important role in astronomy; it is thanks to them that we can see, as in my artworks, facets of the universe that are beyond our reach. These instruments have also given us keys to the start of time, the Big Bang and to the creative fracturing of the universe.
Look at your reflection, you have also been formed by and from this universe, between creation and destruction, analyzed by science and become art.
Found in museums as well as in homes, hung as artworks, I was awed by entomology boxes, full of insects glistening with a thousand colours—being both science and art. Many of us have equally admired the incredible capture of larger pieces of the universe by Hubble and other telescopes for the past thirty years.
Mirrors, their build and modernization, have played an important role in astronomy; it is thanks to them that we can see, as in my artworks, facets of the universe that are beyond our reach. These instruments have also given us keys to the start of time, the Big Bang and to the creative fracturing of the universe.
Look at your reflection, you have also been formed by and from this universe, between creation and destruction, analyzed by science and become art.
All boxes are made using the best-made world-famous entomology boxes from France and hermetically sealed. The butterflies are all created from real species and almost all accurate in size. Every box is unique and named on the back for the species and region of space. Visit www.instagram.com/CosmicEntomology for more.
Featured in the music video For Derek Day "Fine Lines" shot by Vicente Cordero — www.industrialfilms.com
