Australian artist Laith McGregor’s practice spans drawing, painting, sculpture, and video, all mediums which enable his ongoing exploration of the grey area between real and illusion. McGregor evokes the curious and fictitious at every turn. Standing somewhere between the real and the subconscious, his practice takes shape with narratives borrowed from of film, literature, folktales, and lived experience. Blending the fictional and the real, characters and plot lines from these spaces come to life, cementing themselves into his personal language as motifs circulate through the body of work.

Laith McGregor’s celebrated drawings are intricate, fashioned by finely modulated mark-making using pencil or sometimes ball point pen. For him, creating a line is always the starting point for exploration within his wider practice, an expression of his belief that drawing is a fundamental form of human expression. He explains ‘The line as a symbolic gesture dates back to our primitive origins and has filtered into the fabric of everyday life. A primal instinct, the line is used to map, guide, express and converse, it is an immediate action that bridges consciousness.’ McGregor’s inquiry into the grey area between real and unreal has led the artist to a study of intuitive mark-making and the use of the subconscious as a means to guide, express, and perform spontaneous line-form arrangements and compositions. While drawing is the fundamental tenet of his practice McGregor engages with a range of materials,  exhibitions often presenting traditional practice alongside found sculpture and residues from his studio. 

A direct and personal exchange with his audience is characteristic of McGregor’s work. Pithy titles add to a practice that has explored various themes including the self, masculinity and the experience of living between two cultures. Peep holes, or voids, recur continuously, sometimes as devices through which to look at another piece, or as negative spaces that give the suggestion of eyes in otherwise non-figurative art works.