Through nature walks, insect trails and stained glass, this artist seeks healing in wonder

Montreal-based interdisciplinary artist Laura Hudspith's experience with language, her body and its relationship to nature changed when she was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, a chronic illness.

Hudpsith's work spans sculpture, installation, photography and text. She's worked extensively with copper, algae and sea glass. Her art explores her understanding of health, the body and the molecular.

While completing her MFA at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Hudspith became inspired by language and the weight words carry in different circumstances. Language, like meditation, can offer healing, clarity and introspection, she explains.

Through her ritualized walks, which have become central to her life, Hudspith discovered insect trails in the wood of fallen trees. The language-like shapes left by the insects became the inspiration behind her latest exhibition, Wanderer, which is now on view at Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto

Hudspith's newest body of work seeks to find the connections between autoimmunity, language and magic. Guided by her experiences with illness and her interests in philosophy and science, Wanderer explores the microbiological implications of turning inward to heal oneself. The exhibition is made up of floor and wall-mounted sculptures made from stained glass and copper. The organic and fluid shapes of each work mirrors the asymmetry often found in nature. Tendrils of copper branch out throughout the borders of each mounted piece, paralleling the insect-like sculpture, ahead, and behind, and to either side. 

CBC Arts spoke with Hudspith to discuss her work. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

CBC Arts: You explain that your experience with chronic illness has informed your view and interpretation of nature in a metaphysical sense. Can you elaborate on this further?

Laura Hudspith: Becoming chronically ill marked a profound shift for me in many ways. I witnessed the transmutation of my psyche and soma. Through these experiences, I've learned to allow my body and illness to act as guides, and endeavour to train my focus toward considering the bio-possibilities that could emerge from rethinking bodies and illness through the lens of the molecular. 

I've come to see molecules and cells, viral and inorganic matter, as possessing distinct autonomies. These kinds of recognitions open me up to experiencing the healing properties of coming to know something truly profound about oneself and the world — what I call "wonder." And the experience of wonder can be so encompassing that it begins to matter-me to its shape, soothing my body, even assuaging a flare-up of autoimmune symptoms altogether. In this way, wonder becomes a form of molecular healing, and I seek this sensation out.

You've brought up this concept of "magical thinking," something that stems from meditative walks. Could you explain what magical thinking means to you in the context of your art and how it informs your work?

I've found that the act of walking can be practised as a form of healing, particularly when walking amidst densely wooded or pastoral areas outside of urban spaces. There's something really special that happens here: the thump of footfall feels as though it's held closer to our bodies, and to all of the many non-human bodies around you, be they animal, vegetal, geological. In my experience, the effect of this sound dampening, at least of my own movements, creates a spatial sense much like being in a bubble of tranquillity and solitude that moves with you, a bubble that I find ideal for turning inward. 

And yet, in these spaces, you simultaneously become so much more aware of the density of a place, its liveliness and also its expansiveness. I find this heightened, dual awareness to be ideal for reattuning ourselves to self, to our innermost core, but also the world. Walking opens us up for encounters, both within and without.

The work marks a turn toward "magical thinking" insofar as peeling back the metaphysical properties and biomechanical processes behind how immaterial matters — such as language, or the social and cultural structures that order our everyday lives — affect the material world in meaningful ways, such as making us ill or well. Their effects can seem almost "magical" in nature. 

In entering the terrain of inquiry that this word "magic" opens up as it relates to healing, Wanderer draws from my image archive of insect trails I've collected while walking, and from mystical figures of our own making, said to represent the core of our being. Here, I look to the archetypal figure of the "wild woman."  

Like walking rituals that carve pathways in me for healing, wild woman mythos offers insight for deepening our self-knowledge and worldly connection. She embodies our intuition and wisdom and the untamability of our core being. She is conceived of as a healer and life-giver, and as a death doula, even a necromancer or a witch. As our wise and intuitive core, she senses what is no longer working for us about ourselves and guides us through transforming that self-material into something that will better serve us. That is, if we attune ourselves to listen and allow our bodies to act as guides.

How did you make the connection between language and the insect trails found on your meditative walks? 

I've always been drawn to words and texts — how meaning can change and deepen when a few words are strung together. I became more particularly fascinated with semantic linguistics through my experiences with autoimmunity and coming to understand how language shapes our bodies and internal systems. The same words can carry distinct meanings and connotations when uttered outside or inside the medical sphere — for example, differences in meaning that can gnaw at you. 

Through my years of practicing walking meditation, I've amassed an archive of photographs documenting the burrowed insect trails in the cambium layer of the wood in fallen trees. Their trails have always appeared to me as some kind of arcane language or unknowable script that articulates a wisdom truly its own; its meaning is wholly illegible to me as a human, yet nevertheless intelligent. I began tracing these complex markings and serpentine trails, building stained glass patterns for what would become my Seer series, the wall-hanging works in Wanderer. 

What sparked the evolution of the Seer series?

Seers is inspired by the intricate, organic patterns produced by these wood-burrowing insects. Wild woman's eye (2024), made of stained glass and copper, was the first piece made in the Seer series, composing my imaginings of what her ancient and wizened, milky eyes might look like if she were to take corporeal form. She is perhaps capable of reading non-human text. My glassworks incorporate these tracings as either reflections in her eye or a way of seeing. 

Throughout the series, I began to evolve a geometrically perfect oval into increasingly amorphous eye forms with slight asymmetries. Our brains have a preference for symmetry, and encountering slight asymmetries can produce a subtle psychedelic effect. I love the idea that meeting the wild woman's gaze — whose gaze is also our own — might have this effect. 

What was the process like translating the intricate, microscopic realities of insect trails into tangible art forms? 

The process of translation has looked different for each body of work. In my Seer series for Wanderer, using my walking image archive was most intuitive. Some glass patterns were created by tracing the trails directly, building the eye form around them, while others were formed by bringing together or overlaying several trails more instinctively. I felt that allowing for an intuitively-led process would serve as a way for me to honour the source of these images, while also echoing notions of wandering and meandering that are explored throughout the exhibition. 

I love glass, copper, algae and salts. Copper atoms have free electrons that are constantly searching for space and a point of connection, which I find so beautiful. Copper atoms are indeed on the move, changing and becoming just like you and I. I see my materials as collaborators who might help reorient our thinking as we peer into our being. 

Through other bodies of work, I've observed and imaged many of my own cellular structures — breast, ovary, and lymph, for example — as well as molecular bodies that we are often in close relation to, from algae to sedimentary rock. I find that the varied textures and uneven luminosity inherent to stained glass render these microscope-gathered histologies with such clarity and revelation. 

Wanderer is on view at Zalucky Contemporary in Toronto until July 26.