Arts and Culture 6 GOOSECHASE: Inside Laura Bullock’s Senior Art Exhibit

the concept of chasing something that’s impossible to find.”

The result is a dynamic body of work brimming with emotion through the interplay of color, stroke, and subject matter.

Bathed in the Van Evan Smith’s gallery light, Laura Bullock’s ‘23 senior exhibition buzzes on the walls.

Ranging from large-scale canvas paintings to multimedia prints, the culminating work of Bullock’s senior capstone spreads out across the gallery. Bullock, who uses she/ they pronouns, is a Studio Art major and Gender and Sexuality Studies minor. They explained in their artist statement, “I create a spiritual landscape with paint where interactions between animals and nude portraits tell these stories and depict the comedic discrepancy between what I want and what I get.”

The entire exhibit, entitled GOOSECHASE, “includes a lot of birds so it plays with the symbols in the work and also

Both the artistic creation and the accompanying self-reflection made Bullock’s process equally time consuming and fulfilling. In the fall semester Bullock devoted at least twelve hours a week to their art, some weeks reaching nearly twenty hours. The two weeks leading up to the show were increasingly intense with the final touches and gallery planning. However, her work did not begin this year. Bullock began to use art as a vessel for their emotional expression in their senior year of high school and it has been an ever-evolving form. Bullock’s high school painting consisted of acrylic pours on their bedroom floor and a freedom to do what they felt.

Upon formally embarking on the track of an Art Major at Davidson, Bullock became frustrated with the way their work became stiff and their adherence to a “simplistic idea of what painting was.”

Bullock explained the in-between phase of “trying to do realism but not really doing realism.” It wasn’t until after their Junior Capstone that Bullock “rediscovered what I was doing in high school when I was not trying as hard.” Bullock explained the creative journey where “little pieces of what I was doing then have come full circle now.” Now Bullock starts most of their pieces with a “lively” fluid pour of watered down acrylic paint, and then begins to structure the figures and the animals. Bullock remarked on the negative space and how they “leave a lot of space empty, so a lot of fluidity and action can come forward and play back and forth.” The collection demonstrates how different classes, such as printmaking and painting, have influenced Bullock’s creativity.

A few pieces in particular stand out to Bullock from their portfolio. When I asked about Bullock’s favorite piece, they pointed to the strikingly large, bubblegum pink painting facing the entrance of the gallery. The piece, “Inner Child,” was one they were “the most excited about and had the most affection for” because it “took so long to get it right.”

“Inner Child” serves as an introduction to Bullock’s collection as a whole. The themes of relationship, healing, nature, and self mingle with the viewer immediately and provide a gateway into the full show. Bullock attests it was “a labor of love,” and that they didn’t finish it until the week of the show. The piece that came the easiest was “Have Your Cake and Eat it Too.” Bullock explained that the development of the piece involved reworking a previous version of the subject with a new process. In the work, Bullock displays the ongoing process of finding themselves personally and a finding of their artistic style.

At Bullock’s artist talk, they wanted to emphasize the influence of Assistant Professor of Art Katie St. Clair throughout their time at Davidson. They spoke with gratitude for St. Clair, “you see what is in me and drag it out of me.”

Within the work throughout the gallery, Bulluck noted “the layers speak back and forth to each other and examine the healing process.” Bullock’s collection makes visible a conversation with themself, a conversation within the work, and a vulnerable conversation with the audience.

Cate Goodin/2026 (she/her) is an English and Art History major from McLean, VA. She can be reached for comment at cagoodin@davidson.edu