Laura Woermke has served as curator and director of the St. Thomas-Elgin Art Gallery in St. Thomas for over 17 years. In her role as curator, she has cultivated a reputation across Southwestern Ontario for thoughtful, innovative exhibitions that resonate deeply within the community. Gerald Pedros, a longtime St. Thomas resident and prominent regional artist, describes Woermke as “a true motivator in bringing the gallery to a place of relevance in Elgin County.”
However, Woermke’s connection to the arts extends well beyond her curatorial role. A seasoned artist herself, she has honed her techniques and vision, primarily in painting, since her formative years at Fanshawe College in the early 1990s and her first solo exhibition in 2001.
Her latest exhibition, Beyond Belief: Portraits of Uncertainty, currently at Central Studio in London, ON, represents the culmination of two years of work. In these paintings, Woermke merges her curatorial insights with her distinct artistic style to challenge both the conventional approach to viewing art and the viewer’s understanding of what is being seen.
Typically, when a viewer enters an exhibition space, they expect to view each artwork in isolation, moving from piece to piece around the space. However, Woermke’s exhibition, which features twelve medium-sized mixed-media paintings, accompanied by a significant number of smaller pieces, disrupts this notion. Here, it is the collective impact of the works that is crucial to appreciating the work, drawing viewers toward the larger narrative that is woven through the individual pieces and only reveal their full depth when considered as a whole.
Each painting portrays a woman—often a young woman – where the focus is on her face while the rest of her body is submerged in murky water. In this context, Woermke reclaims a convention of painting the female figure under the male artist’s gaze. Traditionally idealized in Western art—from Renoir’s muses, to Degas’ ballet dancers, to Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring—such portrayals have sought to capture the female figure as an object of beauty and innocence. In contrast, Woermke subverts this convention. In these paintings the women are not passive objects of beauty. Instead, they confront the viewer with distorted expressions layered with thick, harsh brush strokes that convey a message of inward trauma. The female subjects’ gaze are slightly averted, so the viewer is able to stand as a voyeur in a “peeping Tom” scenario (in Sartre’s sense), and gaze into the bruised faces, attempting to discern the inner lives, the haunting message behind the surface of these women mired in the depths of … something; something unknowable.
Woermke’s style recalls the psychologically charged work of South African artist Marlene Dumas, known for her portraits that explore her subjects and their inner lives. Similarly, Woermke’s figures suggest an inner landscape. In this case, it is inner lives fraught with uncertainty, struggling to remain afloat. Innocence and beauty are given over to brutal bruising. Woermke describes her work “as distorted and brutally honest depictions” reflecting the harsh social environment that women, particularly young women, are living in. “Using an unrealistic palette to portray flesh,” Woermke writes, “one is left with the feeling of bruised, stained, and broken.” In effect, there is a palatable sense of raw vulnerability that permeates the exhibition.
In her artist statement, Woermke refers to these portraits as self-portraits, reflective of her own journey. “As I delved into my own artistic practice, I began to see uncertainty as a mirror, reflecting the turbulent waters of my own inner landscape,” she writes. However, through these works, she explores themes that resonate deeply in the lives of women today, engaging the viewer in a dialogue about identity, struggle, and self-perception.
As I moved through the exhibition, I found myself contemplating the complex inner worlds of young women today. The figures Woermke paints are neither reaching out nor fighting back. But they do appear like they are passively drowning. I have the strong impulse to reach out, to pull them out of the prevailing darkness and shake them back to life. If indeed swimming in a quagmire of uncertainty is the theme, these women seem to be unconsciously overwhelmed by it.
Unlike Edvard Munch’s visceral The Scream, Woermke conveys a muted calling out to the viewer, silenced by the surroundings that engulf them, sinking without struggling. In one particularly poignant image, labeled #13, the figure is almost completely submerged, encased in her own psychological murkiness.
In Beyond Belief: Portraits of Uncertainty, Woermke taps into a growing theme that feels sharply relevant. We are living through an era of profound global uncertainty—political, economic, environmental, and social. For young women especially, the pressure to navigate this uncertain terrain might appear insurmountable. It has become increasingly difficult to have faith in the future and to clearly see one’s role in it. In a world filled with uncertainty, how will we stay afloat? How do we confront the forces that threaten to pull us under?
Woermke suggests a path forward in her artist’s statement, calling upon the resilience of the human spirit. It is a perspective that elevates the place of the artist in humanity. She writes, “By embracing the unknown, we open ourselves up to a world of possibility, to a deeper understanding of the human experience, and to [see] the profound beauty that can be found in the midst of uncertainty.”
It is a perspective that resonates throughout the exhibition, offering a contemplative look at the precarious moment between surrender and survival.
Nida Home Doherty lives between London Ontario, and Montreal. Through her previous arts writing she has been able to establish Centred.ca, the only arts focussed magazine in Southwestern Ontario.
Images provided by the artist.
