After several country moves during the formative years of my life, and later as an immigrant to Canada, a sense of cultural loss, and the search for a place to call home have been preoccupations that have persistently emerged in my work. Art has been a way to process my interior landscape and at times it has been a catalyst for action, prompting me to instigate interventions into the everyday to mitigate the absence of belonging.

French philosopher Felix Guattari said more than forty years ago, “microscopic attempts of the community…play an absolutely crucial role,” this thinking has been the impetus behind my projects, and it is why I devise encounters that allow for one-to-one or small group interaction, ranging thus far from interviews and letter writing services to passers-by, to participatory yarn installations and group walks. When working with materials, I lean towards the low-tech and the accessible, and typically focus on the experience and the doing of the project, favouring process over finished product. This has led to recent projects where I have been engaging with embroidery, found objects, and walking. These new materials and methods have led me to explore what it means to have an embodied practice and have amplified the element of repetition in my work. Through repetition, I engage in a research-oriented practice that takes the everyday as the sight of exploration.

Documenting, recording dates, and creating evidence are elements of research that appear throughout my work. To conduct research, one must have rules and guidelines, these in turn provide structure to the everyday and a way to create resilience. Eventually though, material production becomes limited in what it can offer, and I return to the practice of relational art in an attempt to create new human relationships through collective experiences. The planned or chance encounter remains a constant interest, and a need to respond to, in my practice. Stitching, walking and noticing, connecting and talking are ultimately actions that center art-making as a healing and restorative practice that can perhaps contribute to a sense of belonging. But it is really only when reaching out that we can hope for connection and belonging, and a response to the call to action.

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Laura Bucci is an interdisciplinary artist working with interventions, textiles, printed matter, and participatory installations. Her work explores issues of loneliness and belonging and mostly manifests itself in attempts to disrupt the everyday and to make connections with the public through planned and chance encounters. She has shown in Vancouver, BC and Nova Scotia at community and public galleries and artist run spaces. Several of her projects have also occurred in the public space unaffiliated to a gallery or institution. She holds a BFA from NSCAD and is a second generation Italian-Canadian immigrant living and practicing on unceded Coast Salish Territory in Vancouver and Mi’kma’ki Territory in Nova Scotia.