Dr Laura Haynes is a writer, editor and the Programme Leader of MLitt Art Writing in the School of Fine Art.
Laura’s writing and research is concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique. Her work is interdisciplinary and cross-form, often presented in multiple registers including publication, exhibition and performance. Her writing both embodies and examines the intimate, cerebral and emotional voice as a rhetorical form where criticality is charged by correlation to the everyday. Her work is underpinned by a feminist approach to understanding social relations between writers and artists, and she has frequently written on forms such as anecdote, conversation and gossip as powerful and political forms of ‘minor literature’.
Publishing internationally, and across various forms, her work is published in journals including MuseMedusa: Revue de Littérature et D’Art Modernes (Review of Modern Literature and Art, University of Montreal), Journal for Writing in Creative Practice (Intellect) and magazines and presses including Sternberg, Freelands Foundation, Nothing Personal and MAP.
Laura’s autotheoretical doctoral thesis (2021) titled The Quick was a hybrid work of biography, memoir and narrative essay. Situated in the biomythographies (Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name) of Chantal Akerman (1950-2015), Doris Lessing (1919-2013), Agnes Martin (1912-2004) and Tillie Olsen (1912-2007), and extended within autobiographical non-fiction, is a meditation on the mother figure, postpartum matrescence, grief and loss, domestic coercion and state control.
Alongside her position at GSA, Laura has played a pivotal role in advancing art writing and performative practices in Scotland as an Editorial Director of MAP, a non-profit organisation dedicated to the discussion and support of artist-led publishing and production, established in 2005. In this role she regularly commissions new writing and editorial projects.
As Programme Leader of MLitt Art Writing, Laura edits The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing, publishing work by international artists and writers, GSA writing-based practitioners and researchers, and graduating Art Writing students.
Research and supervisory interests include: expanded forms of biographical writing, autotheory, critical memoir, cross-form and cross-genre writing, interdisciplinary writing, feminist theory, behavioural theory, reproductive labour, class, ethics and moral theory, somatic practices, matrescence, grief and loss.
Current PhD Students:
Storm Greenwood
Unravelling Text: Reading as a Polyphonic Practice.
Funded by Techne/Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. Co-supervision with Professor Susannah Thompson (GSA)
Maria Howard
TREE/COLUMN/CLAW: an architectural treatise for the climate emergency
Rebecca Meanley
A Hyper Present State
Laura holds a PhD in English Literature (Creative Writing) from the University of Glasgow, an MFA in Contemporary Art Theory & Visual Culture from Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh and a BA (Hons) in Fine Art (Sculpture & Environmental Art) from The Glasgow School of Art.
