Laura Havenhand

Laura Havenhand is a British painter who was born in 1986. She trained at Leeds Metropolitan University, completely a BA in Fine Art in 2009. Currently she works as the curator at Blott Artist Collective, Blackpool, alongside her practice as an artist and a teacher. In her artistic practice, she mainly works in portraiture. She is influenced by minority issues, such as socio-economics themes and discrimination against certain individuals and groups. The tone of her work is often emotional, humorous, and representative of a diversity of viewpoints.

Load Up Your Laundry portrays a muscular naked man sitting in a suggestive pose, looking down at the view, a box of laundry soap placed between his legs. The work is part of series of paintings entitled ‘Domestically Challenged’, in which the artist portrays men in faux advertisements. She reverses the male gaze, putting male models in the hyper-sexualised poses in which we are accustomed to seeing women. The piece is humorous and unapologetically feminist. The fact that it is on display in a women’s art collection, inside a women’s college, makes the reversal of the gaze even more powerful because the viewer is most likely to be a young woman.