Paige Bowen

Featuring the work of Artist Laura Bird, Curated by Paige Bowen

Exhibited at the Durham Medical Center as a Satellite Exhibition Partnership between the Durham Medical Center and the Durham Art Gallery

Resilience is a contemplative exhibition by Laura Bird that presents a series of work developed through slow, intuitive mark-making. Created during and following the global pandemic, the pieces explore endurance, continuity, and quiet strength. Recurring motifs — a lotus flower, winding pathway, falling droplets, and a single eye — form a shared visual language of continuity and renewal, encouraging slow looking and emotional grounding. Subtle passages of watercolour and restrained gold pigment introduce quiet luminosity, activating the surface while preserving the integrity of the drawing. Resilience offers a counterpoint to urgency and spectacle, presenting resilience as something built slowly — through patience, awareness, and the act of returning, mark by mark.

Laura Bird is a multidisciplinary artist working across pen and ink pointillism, watercolour, acrylic painting, figure drawing and mixed media abstraction. Her practice is defined by repetition, layered mark-making, and an intuitive approach to process, allowing time to shape perception and meaning. Informed by a background in graphic and exhibition design, alongside a parallel career as a singer-songwriter, her work demonstrates a refined sense of rhythm, restraint and compositional clarity.