About Laura Shape

Laura Shape is an American fine artist known for transforming leather from invasive species into luminous contemporary paintings inspired by sky, water, light, and movement.

Laura grew up in a small Ohio town and has been making art for as long as she can remember, experimenting over the years with drawing, painting, glass, wood, metals, jewelry, and other materials. She studied art and design at Rochester Institute of Technology.

She then spent more than two decades working as a graphic designer and art director for internet startups in Los Angeles. She loved the speed and immediacy of working digitally, and the fact that something she created could be seen almost instantly by people anywhere in the world.

Over time, though, the impermanence of that work began to weigh on her. Websites were continually redesigned, companies disappeared, and much of what she'd spent years creating eventually vanished. She found herself wanting to make physical, tangible work with a sense of permanence.

In 2015, Laura left the tech industry and moved from Los Angeles to Denver, deciding to pursue art full time as a second career. She spent the next several years experimenting in earnest to find the kind of work she wanted to make. She moved from small sculptures and textured encaustics into leather handbags and decorative leather bowls, developing her love of working with natural leather before ultimately shifting fully into fine art.

Finding the Material

Once she began working in fine art, however, Laura found herself uneasy with the idea of using another animal's skin simply as a painting surface. At the same time, she still loved the natural textures and uniqueness that working with leather allowed. So she started searching for a material she could feel fully good about using, and discovered the story of invasive species and the enormous damage they can cause when introduced into ecosystems where they have no natural controls.

She also learned that some of these animals were being turned into leather. In invasive lionfish, Burmese python, and carp leathers, she found materials that are highly textural, visually distinctive, environmentally meaningful, and aligned with her values. By incorporating these leathers into her paintings, she could help build demand for these materials, support important invasive-species removal, and help protect the ecosystems they threaten.

The Work Today

Today, color, composition, experimentation, and the experience of the viewer are central to her paintings, but so are their physicality and texture. Scales, seams, markings, and irregularities remain visible beneath the paint, allowing the material itself to participate in the image.

For Laura, that unique physical presence has become increasingly meaningful in a world filled with frictionless digital images and perfect reproduction. Each painting begins with a surface that already has natural patterns, imperfections, and a history that can't be duplicated. Because of that, each finished work can exist only as that singular piece.

Her imagery is often drawn from experiences of expansiveness in nature: looking toward a distant horizon, watching light move across water, seeing birds cross a vast sky, and remembering a place not as a collection of precise details but more as a feeling. Laura is interested in recreating the feelings these experiences evoke in her: serenity, freedom, wonder, and the calm she experiences from being surrounded by something as vast and timeless as ocean and sky.

There’s also a contradiction at the center of the work. The animals that provide these extraordinary surfaces are environmentally destructive in the ecosystems where they've become invasive. Laura doesn't erase that history. She transforms it, allowing ecological disruption, human intervention, beauty, and possibility to exist within the same artwork.

Her work has been commissioned by the International SeaKeepers Society, which named her Artist of the Year in 2025. It has been featured in publications including Popular Science, Nautilus, Whitehot Magazine, 5280, and Denver Life Magazine, and included in two exhibitions at a Smithsonian Affiliate museum and in an exhibition endorsed by the United Nations Ocean Decade. Her paintings are held in private collections in the United States and United Kingdom.

Laura lives and works in Denver, Colorado.

Artist Statement
A deeper look at the ideas and intentions behind the work.

Curriculum Vitae
Selected exhibitions, awards, collaborations, talks, press, and collections.