“I build the imagined world around the truth.”
Truth Inside the Imagined World
Laura Antonia Abbott builds conceptual photographs in which lived experience enters carefully invented landscapes. The British fine art photographer, poet, and Usui Reiki Master is based in Lisbon, Portugal, after a life shaped by residence across five continents. Exposure to different cultures and identities sharpened her interest in how people understand themselves and one another, while an early attraction to biography, true stories, and emotional complexity gave her work a distinctly human foundation. Her photographs often begin with something real, such as a psychological state, a personal memory, or another person’s experience, then move outward into surreal settings where that truth can be seen from a different angle.
Art was already central during Abbott’s years at boarding school, when much of her free time was spent making things in the art room. Poetry developed alongside visual work as another means of encoding emotion through symbolism and hidden meanings. Those interests have remained closely connected. Abbott is dyslexic and describes herself as intensely visual, with a tendency to think and communicate pictorially. Photography eventually became the medium in which storytelling, symbolism, performance, objects, colour, and constructed environments could coexist without forcing an experience into literal illustration.
Her photographic education began with analogue and medium format cameras, long before digital photography became dominant. Working exclusively with black and white film taught her to read light, contrast, and colour indirectly, while the square frame became a lasting formal preference. She values its sense of containment, treating each photograph as a complete world that can draw the viewer inward. That combination of technical discipline and imaginative staging still defines her practice, even as the methods surrounding the camera have become more expansive and intuitive.
Laura Antonia Abbott: Constructing the Image as Talisman
Abbott once approached image making through a highly controlled process. Ideas were sketched, planned, and strategically assembled with precision, partly because she believed creativity needed structure in order to function within accepted expectations. Over time, both her art and spiritual practice changed that relationship to control. Research and sketching still provide a foundation, followed by prop making, set construction, clothing choices, and the shoot itself, but she now leaves room for unexpected shifts. The process remains deliberate without requiring the final image to behave exactly as first imagined.
That openness is most apparent during the shoot. Abbott describes moments when the energy of an image seems to change and its essential character becomes perceptible, almost as if the work has begun to direct its own completion. Editing and colour adjustment then become another stage of recognition rather than simple correction. Her experience as a Usui Reiki Master has strengthened her trust in intuition, especially when an element appears before she fully understands its significance. Meaning can arrive later, sometimes with a resonance that was not consciously planned at the time of making.
This way of working gives physical details unusual weight. Clothing, handmade props, landscape, colour, butterflies, paper birds, mirrors, and other objects are selected as active parts of the image rather than decoration. Abbott compares their symbolic potential to the visual language of Tarot, where different viewers may notice entirely different signs according to their own histories. John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is important to her for a related reason: looking is never neutral. Once a photograph leaves the artist and enters an exhibition or another person’s life, its meaning continues to change through the memories, emotions, and associations brought to it.
Fire, Mirrors, and the Evolution of Self
Among Abbott’s most meaningful works is The Fire Between Mirrors, a series photographed in the dunes near Guincho on Portugal’s Atlantic coast. The project began with a clear concept and preparatory sketches, yet the work became harder to explain as the shoot approached. During its creation, another language emerged beyond the original plan. The shifting dunes were chosen intentionally because Abbott associates nature with healing, but their constant disappearance and reformation also offered a precise metaphor for identity. Transformation, in this series, is not limited to dramatic rupture. It can begin almost invisibly, with the recognition that an old version of the self can no longer contain what comes next.
The repeated figure in the landscape represents multiple selves carried at once: past, present, emerging, abandoned, and reimagined. Mirrors introduce confrontation and reflection, while fire functions not as destruction but as a catalyst for renewal. Abbott’s background in textiles enters through clothing and constructed details, some selected and others adapted or made by hand. Each element helps convert an internal process into a physical scene before the camera records it. Staged portraiture, raw elements, mirrors, garments, and handmade components become a single symbolic system for release, survival, and change.
The series acquired deeper significance after the photographs were completed. Abbott later realized that events in her life and the sitter’s life had begun to mirror one another with what she describes as uncanny precision. Experiences neither had anticipated made the images feel almost prophetic in retrospect. The themes already embedded in the photographs seemed to describe processes they would later have to endure: letting go, surviving disruption, and becoming someone different. For Abbott, that sequence reinforced her belief that an artwork can sometimes contain knowledge before its maker has consciously understood it.
Laura Antonia Abbott: Expanding the Language of Healing
Abbott’s influences move freely between photography, literature, personal experience, and spiritual practice. As she puts it, “Life itself, in all its beauty, complexity, pain and transformation, remains my greatest influence.” Cindy Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills, introduced to her by an art teacher when she was seventeen, encouraged serious experimentation with self portraiture and helped establish her interest in sequence and narrative. She has continued appearing in her own photographs across different stages of life, using the camera to release ideas or emotions held internally. Tim Walker’s constructed worlds, Gregory Crewdson and Anna Gaskell’s psychological staging, Guy Bourdin’s colour and theatrical tension, and Julia Fullerton Batten have each contributed to the visual vocabulary she developed in her own direction.
Literature gives that vocabulary another dimension. Abbott is drawn to Isabel Allende’s magical realism and its ability to place the everyday, ancestral, spiritual, and extraordinary beside one another without demanding explanation. Baudelaire contributes an attraction to melancholy, beauty, and darkness, while Rilke speaks to her interest in inward and spiritual experience. These references help explain why her photographs can feel both theatrical and intimate. The surreal setting does not remove the work from reality. Instead, it creates enough distance for difficult states of mind, private struggles, and questions of identity to be encountered symbolically.
Her daily practice reflects the same movement between observation and intuition. Meditation, offerings at her altars, ocean swimming, forest walks, notebooks, poetry fragments, dreams, and sketches all feed future images. Photography remains her primary medium, but she is increasingly interested in allowing poetry, textiles, painting, objects, and channelled imagery to cross into the work. Alongside launching a photographic print store, she hopes to create a photographic deck combining photography, poetry, archetypal imagery, Tarot, and Kabbalah. Conceived as a set of visual portals for contemplation, the project would bring together two central strands of her life: the artist who constructs symbolic worlds and the healer who listens for what those worlds might reveal.
