Laura Williams is an Auckland-based painter whose works unfold like small theatrical worlds – layered, vivid and charged with memory.

Drawing from art history, film, mythology and personal experience, Williams builds each painting from a collage of references that feel at once familiar and strangely specific. Figures, symbols and fragments recur across her works, forming a kind of private visual language that invites viewers to find their own connections within it.

Working on deep, custom-made panels, her compositions take on an almost stage-like presence. Scenes play out within these intimate spaces, where moments of humour, discomfort and reflection sit side by side.

Her latest series, Terms of Endurement, reflects on memory, youth and the lingering weight of experience. Beneath the colour and complexity is a sharp, often irreverent perspective – one that embraces contradiction, blending sincerity with wit, and personal history with shared cultural imagery.