Laura M. Cañas P.
Visual Artist and Teaching Artist. My main media is printmaking. With my art, I tell stories of gender violence, identity, healing and relationship with nature. I enjoy experimenting with other media as well, like video and installation. Additional, I work as a teacher for 2-5 years old children, and I prepare lesson plans based on the art integration and child-led approach.
Portfolio
▷2021-Ongoing/ Transmutaciones (Transmutations)
▷2025/ El futuro es poético (The Future is Poetic)
▷2025/ Despertar en casa (Waking Up at Home)
▷2025/ Visuals for the New Media Art and Sound Summit
▷2025/ May 17: Ritual para encontrar caminos (Ritual for Finding Paths)
▷2025/ Tres Tres Tres Sinapsis
▷2024/ Residency at Alchemy Art Center & Atrapar al sol (Catching the Sun)
▷2024/ Residency Welcome to my Homepage: Classifieds for Poets
▷2017-2022/ Etchings made at Grabadores de domingo (Sunday Printmakers)
Transmutaciones (Transmutations)
An ongoing series initiated in 2021, this project invites collaborating artists to create photographs (digital and analog) of a people using capes and masks within natural landscapes. The work explores the relationship between subject and environment, allowing the specific context of each location to redefine the figure's narrative and vice versa.
Below is a series of photographs taken with artist Santiago Silva, featuring Chavela and Pablito Armijos. The photographs were taken at the San Sebastián Nature Reserve (Envigado), Cerro El Volador, and Casa Mutante (Medellín) in Colombia.
The following photographs were captured on the coast of the Salish Sea on San Juan Island (WA, USA) with B.H. I am featured as the masked figure.
This series was created alongside artist Tomás Díaz at the Alchemy Art Center (WA, USA) and in Austin (TX, USA), featuring myself as the masked figure.
El futuro es poético (The Future is Poetic)
“El futuro es poético” (The Future is Poetic) is an installation of a relief print on fabric, featuring tree branches. It is an exploration of bringing printmaking into the realm of 3D. The installation measures 20 x 30 inches.
The phrase “The Future is Poetic” comes from the project “Classifieds for Poets.” It is a statement that hopefully declares that in the future, the symbolic and spiritual will have more value for society than the material. Nov, 2025.
Despertar en casa (Waking Up at Home)
“Despertar en casa” (Waking Up at Home) is a series of five prints that illustrate the nostalgia of migration and how the identity forged in our homeland also travels within us. It invites us to listen to the Earth and enter the magical worlds of nature. The mountains stamped in the backgrounds correspond to a 360-degree drawing that the artist made in 2020 of the horizon of her hometown of Medellín, located in the middle of the central mountain range of the Andes in Colombia. Oct, 2025.
Visuals for the New Media Art and Sound Summit 2025
Laura Cañas and Tomás Díaz created these visuals for NMASS 2025, which consisted of the projection of live written texts that interpreted the sounds performed by Veronica Anne Salinas and Phonography Austin during their show. Some of the texts used came from bibliographic sources. The audience was able to add texts to the projection by joining the shared document in which the texts were written.
The visual in this presentation featured a double projection: on one side of the screen, the transcription of the texts by Laura C. and Tomás D. and the audience, and on the other side, the live ceramic work of another artist. Sept, 2025.
Mayo 17: Ritual para encontrar caminos (Ritual for Finding Paths)
Performance and installation made during the CATs+ 2025 residency organized by MOHA (Austin, TX) and presented during the resident showcase. It consisted of an installation of a black space in the middle of the gallery, created with theater curtains, with tree branches around it, like a large dark tree. The performance interacted with the installation. Messages with spiritual exercises to the audience during the performance, the messages comes from my previous work called “Tres Tres Tres Sinapsis”. At the end of the performance, I arranged the branches on the floor to create different possible paths. The project symbolized the celebration of light that allows us to find paths when there is darkness. May, 2025.
Tres Tres Tres Sinapsis
A web game created I created for my 33rd birthday, featuring spiritual exercises and rituals that aim to create well-being and interaction with the inner and outer world through small actions. It was made as a grateful offering to the world for keeping me alive. Visit the link: https://tres-tres-tres-sinapsis.neocities.org/?p=7px April, 2025.
During this residency, I also had the opportunity to create my own personal work. I created a print series called, Atrapar al sol (Catching the Sun), it represents the healing process as a female figure approaching the sun and merging with it.I used linoleum, foam sheets, and a collagraphy of plant leaves for this series. June, 2024.
I made an artist residency at Alchemy Art Center between May and June 2024. There, I had access to art studios where I was able to create my engraving work and learn ceramics, cyanotype and natural dying. I also taught a drypoint class and supported artistic events. And I made two illustrations that were printed on tote bags and postcard for special events.
Classifieds for Poets
“Classifieds for Poets“ is a net-art project I made for the virtual residency program “Welcome to my Homepage” of the Museum of Human Achievement (Austin, TX). This project asks about how the economy would be if the symbolic creation were its motor, as opposed to the money-material capitalism. In a poetic society, where the economy is based on symbolic production, what would "profit” be? Visit the link: https://homepageguest.wixsite.com/classifiedsforpoets March, 2024.
Etchings made at Grabadores de domingo (Sunday Printmakers)
From 2019 to 2022, I was a member of the collective Grabadores de Domingo (Sunday Printmakers) at Taller Talante in Envigado. We met several Sundays each month at the Taller Talante in Envigado to practice traditional intaglio techniques, specifically etching and aquatint. The group is guided by Colombian artist José Antonio Suárez Londoño.
Montaña Valle (Mountain Valley)
A series of six linocut prints based on a drawing of the 360-degree horizon of the mountains surrounding my hometown, Medellín, Colombia, which is located in a valley. Fragments of the horizon are overlaid in layers of different opacities and tones.
This series is a formal exploration of the Medellin horizon, questioning how it can change. Medellin is a changing and very active city, sometimes chaotic, which paradoxically can feel repetitive and confining. I felt that change was necessary and welcome. February, 2021.
Máscaras (Masks)
Masks is a series of ten linoleum prints about the process of recovering one's identity after suffering gender-based violence. Around the changing figure of a mask, I portray my personal experience of having suffered this violence. I depict how I felt that the pain detached me from my body and deformed it, how I was asked to remain silent and how Catholicism trained me to obey that silence. I created this series to portray a violence that many women have suffered. This series has been a turning point in my artistic and restoring process.
I am interested in masks as objects that can represent two opposites: on one side, imposition and censorship; on the other side, personal choice and reassuring identity. After this series, masks became a frequent feature in my artistic practice. This is the project resulting from the Emerging Artists Grant, Medellín Secretariat of Culture, Colombia (2020). November, 2020.
Medellín
Medellín is a series of linocuts created between 2017 and 2019, inspired by the urban landscapes and bustling street life of my hometown.
La hoja y la Serpiente (The leaf and The Snake)
I made this series of engravings at university for a jewelry metal finishes class. The series is inspired by the stories of ethnobotanist Richard Evan Schultes in the Colombian Amazon, narrated by Wade Davis in his book The River. November, 2016.
Laura M. Cañas P. © 2025. All rights reserved.