Laura Gonzalez is an artist and writer. Her recent practice encompasses film, dance, photography and text, and her work has been exhibited and published in the UK, Spain and Portugal. She has spoken at numerous conferences and events, including the Museum for the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York, the Medical Museum in Copenhagen, College Arts Association and the Association for the Psychoanalysis of Culture and Society. When she is not following Freud, Lacan and Marx’s footsteps with her camera, she runs psychoanalytic seminars at various UK and European institutions.
Her most recent project, completed in 2010, investigated psychoanalytic approaches to making and understanding objects of seduction, including an examination of parallels between artistic and analytic practices, a study of Manolo Blahnik’s shoes as objects of desire, a disturbing encounter with Marcel Duchamp’s last work, and the creation of a psychoanalytically inspired Discourse of the Artefact, a framework enabling the circulation of questions and answers through a relational approach to artworks. She is currently immersed in an interdisciplinary project exploring knowledge and the body of the hysteric.
As well as overseeing the doctoral programme, she currently teaches two masters electives where students engage in psychoanalytic theory through producing practice (Analysis and Self-Analysis; Psychoanalysis in Art and Culture). She is engaged in teaching and supervision at external institutions (including Transart Institute and Chelsea College of Art and Design), and she currently supervises four research degree students at GSA:
• Cara Broadley, Outlining the Gap: visualising design research methods (as Director of Studies)
• Emma Balkind, Speculating on the Cultural Commons: investigating 'weak theory' as strategy for future flourishing (as Supervisor)
• Myria Christophini, Animating Peace: A Practice-Led Inquiry into the potential of Animation to act as a tool for peace-building (as Supervisor)
• Heike Lowenstein, The role of panoramic photography in communicating the relevance of place in the formation of identity, MPhil (as Supervisor)
Laura is interested in supervising research degree projects focusing on psychoanalytic approaches to art, especially Freudian and Lacanian; fetishism and perversion in art, design and architecture; reflexive and self-reflexive methodologies; performance for the camera; theories of the gaze in photography; dance and art; and innovative forms of writing.
