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From Lora Calora

I am Laura Crespi, working under the name LoRaCaLoRa, an Italian-born, Aotearoa-based emerging artist whose practice explores identity, vulnerability, transformation, and the emotional complexity of lived experience.

My creative journey began in fashion and textiles at the NABA Fine Arts Academy in Milan, followed by years working within the Italian fashion industry. After relocating to Aotearoa New Zealand in 2013, I eventually found my way into fine art. In 2019, painting became a vital form of communication, survival, and self-discovery; a language through which I could process experiences that words could not contain.

Moving between abstraction, figuration, and intuitive mark-making, I create emotionally charged works that exist between vulnerability and strength, chaos and order, intimacy and distance. I work across memory, sensation, gesture, and materiality, allowing the painting to evolve through layers, marks, erasures, symbols, and fragments of lived experience.

My debut solo exhibition, Odyssey of a Liminal Mind, presented in Auckland in 2024, marked a defining moment in my practice. It established a visual language rooted in emotional honesty, psychological depth, and the courage to remain open in the face of uncertainty.

Through Ca_lo_ra, my work becomes a meditation on presence, resilience, identity, and becoming. I am interested in the spaces between what is known and unknown, where boundaries dissolve and meaning remains fluid.

For me, painting is both an act of survival and an act of transformation: a way of turning vulnerability into visual language, ugly into something somehow pleasant for the eye and who personal experience into something that can be felt, shared, and reimagined.