About
Laura Oczos (b. 1984, Newcastle) is a painter based in Wollongong, NSW. Working primarily in acrylic, she creates psychological landscapes that explore memory, instability and the way environments retain evidence of change.
Rather than depicting specific locations, Oczos constructs landscapes from memory. Familiar forms—trees, branches, hills and vegetation are repeated, altered and reassembled until the resulting place feels recognisable but cannot be located. These environments operate as liminal spaces, shaped as much by absence, recollection and forgetting as by the physical world.
Her paintings exist within an ongoing, loosely connected sequence: rupture, aftermath and recovery. In the rupture works, the landscape appears to be destabilising or undergoing an unnamed event. Forms fragment, the ground shifts and matter seems to evaporate or move through the environment. The aftermath paintings consider what remains. They are quieter and more desolate, holding the uneasy stillness that follows a change whose cause is never revealed. In the recovery works, the landscape begins to reform, although it does not necessarily return to its previous state. Veils, threads and recurring forms suggest a slow process of reconstruction in which memory, place and experience are woven together differently.
Alongside the paintings, Oczos creates monochrome collages using photocopied imagery, tape and transparent layers. These works function as fragments or evidence from the same unresolved world: partial records that appear capable of being understood but never fully resolve.
Across these bodies of work, the landscape is not presented as a passive setting. It becomes a psychological and temporal space—something capable of fracturing, remembering and reorganising itself.
Oczos is represented by Anthea Polson Gallery, Queensland. In 2024, she received the Anthea Polson Gallery Award at the Paddington Art Prize.
Prizes / Awards
2024 - Winner The Anthea Polson Gallery Prize, The Paddington Art prize
2024 - Finalist The Paddington Art Prize
2024 - Finalist Lethbridge Landscape Prize
2024 - Finalist Corner Store Gallery Landscape Prize
2023 - Finalist National Contemporary Art Prize
2023 - Finalist Lethbridge 20000
2023 - Finalist Art to Art Unearthed Prize
2023 - ACB Selects National Emerging Art Prize
2022 - Highly Commended National Contemporary Art Prize
2022 - Finalist National Contemporary Art Prize
2022 - Finalist Art to Art Unearthed Prize
2021 - Finalist National Contemporary Art Prize.
2021 - Finalist Lethbridge 20000