Laurel Fulton CV

STATEMENT:

My work investigates human connection through the lenses of communication, bodily perception, and relational exchange. I am interested in how romantic, platonic, and familial relationships are formed, mediated, and transformed through interaction. What is expressed between individuals is always subject to interpretation, misalignment, and personal experience, producing a metaphorical gap that complicates intimacy and mutual understanding.

In my former work the apparatuses I create seek to render the intangible gap between individuals tangible. These sculptural objects physically link participants while maintaining distance through the space they occupy, embodying both the desire for intimacy and the impossibility of complete union. They function as tools for mediated interaction, foregrounding the tension between connection and disconnection that characterizes human relationships.

For my most recent, in progress body of work I draw from natural and cosmic systems. Binary star formations, solar systems, cellular division, and sexual and asexual reproduction as models for understanding how metaphoric bodies interact and affect one another. Across these systems, bodies do not exist in isolation but in shared environments where proximity, force, and circumstance determine how they collide, merge, divide, or orbit. The circle or flattened sphere recurs as a formal structure within my work, signifying the body or bodies in the interaction. In both celestial and biological contexts, membranes and gravitational forces simultaneously protect, bind, and impose limits, enabling connection, separation, fusion and sometimes produces a new bodily format. I see these universal systems replicated in the relationships we have with one another.

Photography operates as a means of documenting and extending these performative encounters. The images capture moments of near-contact between two bodies, or between a body and an object, freezing interactions in a state of suspension. By arresting these exchanges in the moment of “almost,” the work inhabits the in-between. Where bodies remain separate, meaning remains in a state of flux, and connection is perpetually deferred.

BIO:

Laurel Fulton is an object and image maker based in Rochester, New York. She holds a BA from the University of Northern Colorado and an MFA from the University of Georgia. Fulton has taught at Grand Valley State University and serves as tenure-track faculty at Rochester Institute of Technology. Her work explores human connection, relational systems, and the interplay between bodies and objects.