ON VIEW
April 18 – 16, 2025
May 8 – 17, 2025

OPENING RECEPTIONS
Friday, April 18, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday, May 8, 5 – 7 pm

Laura Oertel

@lauraoertel

Laura Oertel is an interdisciplinary artist whose work is born from a place of intranarration, the allure of belligerence, and the ability to piss in the yard with no witnesses. She celebrates the ecstasy of technical skill as a weaver and papermaker while reveling in pattern as abstraction, uselessness as elevation, and chaos as control. She hails from Farmville, Virginia where she founded the artist residency, Lackland Well, while collaborating with the community to develop workshops, lecture series, and celebrate the improvisational logic of craft. Oertel holds a BFA and Post-Baccalaureate in Craft from Longwood University in Prince Edward, Virginia, and she received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts from Maine College of Art and Design in Portland, Maine.

Through my studio practice, I pay reverence to an ostentatious saturation of color and the self-cannibalizing abilities of cloth and paper. I use traditional craft processes of weaving and papermaking to collaborate with color and employ modes of belligerent joy and misbehavior. I celebrate imperfection to ride the line between too muchness and not enoughness while utilizing material layering as a visualization of time and humor. Living in and learning from the weaving traditions of Appalachia, my material processes simultaneously make jokes about craft while also lending a critique to the ongoing marginalization of the craft world. My practice exudes aliveness, all the while undergoing arduous repetitive motions I call the protestant act of edging. I gift these works to the viewer as the optimistic, annoyingly superior main character heroine of every piece of young adult fiction we have ever known and loved, all the while subverting fixed expectations of these traditions and techniques at hand.



The MFA Thesis Exhibitions for the Class of 2025 incorporate a range of making practices unified by the overwhelming concerns these students have for their environment, their communities, their families, and their own wellbeing. With an emphasis on the personal, and at times the anecdotal, these 17 artists make a variety of contributions in the form of ceramics, drawings, paintings, photographs, poems, prints, sculptures, sound and video installations, and textiles. The nature of their work and research demonstrates the caliber and cultural relevance of Maine College of Art & Design’s Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art program.