Laura Engdahl lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is inspired to create quiet spaces out of the chaos of an increasingly interconnected world.  Her mixed media work is inspired by the ethereal nature of time and the idea of growth and expansion.  She layers imagery gradually, developing a visual narrative about a world that is constantly growing and in flux.  Her layers are suggestive; revealing portions of a story, a memory, a place.

 Her background surfaces begin with nostalgic materials with a history — things like handwritten letters home from a war, out–of–print Italian textbooks, her daughter’s grade school homework, and vintage blueprints for buildings built over a century ago.  Gradually as the layers evolve, she quiets them by selectively adding, scraping, incising, obscuring, and sanding, often revealing buried layers from the background of the work. 

Laura has exhibited extensively for over 35 years and her work is in private collections and part of permanent public collections at Stanford University Hospital, Land Rover, Inc., and the cities of Palo Alto and Dublin, California.