Laura Zelaya

Laura Zelaya grew up in a family of artists: Her mother is a wood sculptor, her father a painter, and her sister a dancer and choreographer. In 1975, at seven years old, her family moved to Berlin for an artist’s residency. The city was riveting; the family lived in a house of artists in a city where art was seemingly everywhere. The young Zelaya wove her way in and out of workshops and studios filled with conversation about art, and in the best moments was invited to participate in making.

Like many children of artists, Zelaya chose not to pursue her parents’ art forms; instead, she studied theater and set design and fabrication for many years. She began to make singular wooden kinetic gifts for friends. In time, what began as singular gifts for friends with children became a business making beautiful, imaginative, vividly painted kinetic toys from wood. But moving from individual and wondrous gifts to small scale production can change everything: What was imaginative and playful comes to feel like labor, so Zelaya moved away from the business of handmade toy production and began to focus on kinetic sculptures in which poetic, cultural, and sometimes overtly political narratives are enacted on stage sets rarely more than twelve inches wide.

Zelaya’s machine parts are typically hidden from view, inviting us into the narrative rather than the how of her work. Behind the scenes she is a builder and inventor. With a scroll saw, a drill press, and a sander, as well as various hand tools in her home shop, Zelaya plays with combinations of concepts reminiscent of physics class or machine shop to make a mouth open and an eyelid rise in one gesture.