Laura Townsend is a London-based artist whose work explores connections between people, histories and the environments we move through, both physical and cultural. Through storytelling, playfulness and colour, she reveals unexpected perspectives on the world around us.
At the heart of her practice is a fascination with human behaviour and the factors that shape the way we think, feel and act. Her work often begins with an observation about contemporary life, before drawing on familiar visual languages, historical references and systems to reframe it, encouraging us to see it differently. Her background in creative strategy, where she spent many years exploring why people engage, continues to inform this approach. Research is central to this process, with archives and museum collections often shaping her ideas. Material experimentation, across digital and analogue processes, then allows those ideas to evolve through making.
Her recent body of work, Symptoms of the Present, developed at the RCA, creates a fictional botanical taxonomy of contemporary emotional states. It began after Townsend came across a Victorian book on floriography and became fascinated by a lost language in which flowers carried coded messages. While we still give flowers today, their meanings have largely disappeared, with the gesture often driven by convention rather than symbolism. She realised that many contemporary feelings, such as FOMO or climate anxiety, had no equivalent within this Victorian language. Rather than relabelling existing blooms, she created new botanical specimens to reflect the emotional landscape of contemporary life.
The project comprises two interconnected bodies of work that explore different modes of looking: a herbarium series that classifies contemporary feelings as fictional botanical specimens and After Ruysch, a reimagining of a seventeenth-century Dutch still life by Rachel Ruysch that shifts from classification to observation, bringing those specimens into the natural world as though they were real.
Layering is central to both the concept and the making process. Beginning with photography and digital collage, the specimens are then developed through analogue processes. Within the herbarium, chine collé and embroidery echo the physical composition of pressed botanical specimens, while etching and letterpress draw on the authority of historical botanical illustration. In the still life, Townsend continues to use many of these same processes, but to fulfil a different purpose. By preserving Ruysch’s original composition and introducing her own specimens as separate layers, both remain visible, allowing the historical and contemporary to coexist within a single image.
Laura is the Winner of the Imprint x RCA Graduate Prize 2026.
Laura Townsend is a London-based artist whose work explores connections between people, histories and the environments we move through, both physical and cultural. Through storytelling, playfulness and colour, she reveals unexpected perspectives on the world around us.
At the heart of her practice is a fascination with human behaviour and the factors that shape the way we think, feel and act. Her work often begins with an observation about contemporary life, before drawing on familiar visual languages, historical references and systems to reframe it, encouraging us to see it differently. Her background in creative strategy, where she spent many years exploring why people engage, continues to inform this approach. Research is central to this process, with archives and museum collections often shaping her ideas. Material experimentation, across digital and analogue processes, then allows those ideas to evolve through making.
Her recent body of work, Symptoms of the Present, developed at the RCA, creates a fictional botanical taxonomy of contemporary emotional states. It began after Townsend came across a Victorian book on floriography and became fascinated by a lost language in which flowers carried coded messages. While we still give flowers today, their meanings have largely disappeared, with the gesture often driven by convention rather than symbolism. She realised that many contemporary feelings, such as FOMO or climate anxiety, had no equivalent within this Victorian language. Rather than relabelling existing blooms, she created new botanical specimens to reflect the emotional landscape of contemporary life.
The project comprises two interconnected bodies of work that explore different modes of looking: a herbarium series that classifies contemporary feelings as fictional botanical specimens and After Ruysch, a reimagining of a seventeenth-century Dutch still life by Rachel Ruysch that shifts from classification to observation, bringing those specimens into the natural world as though they were real.
Layering is central to both the concept and the making process. Beginning with photography and digital collage, the specimens are then developed through analogue processes. Within the herbarium, chine collé and embroidery echo the physical composition of pressed botanical specimens, while etching and letterpress draw on the authority of historical botanical illustration. In the still life, Townsend continues to use many of these same processes, but to fulfil a different purpose. By preserving Ruysch’s original composition and introducing her own specimens as separate layers, both remain visible, allowing the historical and contemporary to coexist within a single image.
Laura is the Winner of the Imprint x RCA Graduate Prize 2026.
