In 1997-2000, she studied in the Art Institute of the University of Opole, where she completed her BA. From 1999 she studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw. She completed her diploma in the atelier of prof. Leon Podsiadły in 2004. From 2006 she has run the E. Geppert visiting atelier at this academy. She makes paintings, installations, videos, games and objects.
In her works and projects, Laura Pawela creates an iconography of the contemporary world by applying the aesthetics of computer programs or of mobile phones' displays. By doing so, she usually achieves a double effect - on the one hand that of a joke, on the other, that of hidden social critique. Due to this fact her work is coherent, its development logical, and at the same time, the artist manages to touch upon various issues - from virtual reality and man's place in it, through feminist and social themes, to the problem of the author and his/her involvement in the institutional network.
One of the first works of Laura Pawela was Wykroj mojego ciala (Pattern of My Body, 2001), modelled after a tailor's pattern. The precisely sketched schemes of particular elements, with the use of which one could sew the artist's double, were complemented by sepia photos of her body marked with a dotted line, signed 'model 152, size 36', which alluded to plastic surgery or ancient medical atlases. During the happening entitled EuroDrama in Wrocław, Pawela sewed her double in flannel, encouraging others to do the same. Pattern can be treated as both a joke and a serious stance on the objectification of the female body. Female roles were dealt with directly in two works from 2004. In the slap tag CHWDF, using a popular wall inscription insulting the Police (literally F...k the Police), the artist changed the letter P (for Police) for F which can be read in various ways, as Feminists or Folks (meaning Men). In the photographic series entitled Bitches the artist photographed inscriptions insulting for women, found in various public places.
One of the first works of Laura Pawela was Wykroj mojego ciala (Pattern of My Body, 2001), modelled after a tailor's pattern. The precisely sketched schemes of particular elements, with the use of which one could sew the artist's double, were complemented by sepia photos of her body marked with a dotted line, signed model 152, size 36, which alluded to plastic surgery or ancient medical atlases. During the happening entitled EuroDrama in Wrocław, Pawela sewed her double in flannel, encouraging others to do the same. Pattern can be treated as both a joke and a serious stance on the objectification of the female body. Female roles were dealt with directly in two works from 2004. In the slap tag CHWDF, using a popular wall inscription insulting the Police (literally F...k the Police), the artist changed the letter P (for Police) for F which can be read in various ways, as Feminists or Folks (meaning Men). In the photographic series entitled Bitches, the artist photographed inscriptions insulting for women, found in various public places.
Laura Pawela gained popularity, however, as the author of a series of works using computer aesthetics and simple electronic displays. In a long-term project entitled Reallaura (2002-2004) she regularly created and sent by e-mail images resembling icons from green mobile phone displays, which related directly to her personal, private life. She also made a series of paintings based on these images. By doing so, she reproduced the scheme of a reality show, ridiculing it at the same time. Inscriptions accompanying her images were full of irony (Well, am I a depressed house wife?), frustration usually attributed to women (Why am I so fat?), or simply banal (I will be late again because of this make-up). The artist criticised contemporary means of communication as to simple, limited to a narrow range of signs, and reducing inter-human relations to stereotypical orders. Pawela also used the aesthetics of mobile phones in her diploma project from 2004 entitled Mobile Phone Budda.
At the exhibitions XProblems and Reality LP in 2004, Laura Pawela presented a series of paintings inspired by the Windows OS. The paintings were stylised as windows with computer messages, which had been replaced here by messages exchanged between people.
It was me who became a system communicating with the environment on what I did not like, what were my problems, indecisions, questions regarding my art and myself - claimed the artist.
Pawela also used a desktop wallpaper characteristic of Windows - a view of a blue sky with clouds, which she used for covering the walls of the exhibition space. All her actions pointed to the attractiveness of the virtual world and its detachment from reality. A different sort of mixing was applied by the artist in an installation entitled Natural View (2006) presented at the Łódź Biennial. Pawela replaced a popular Windows desktop with a very similar video, registering the landscape and the sky somewhere near Opole. The viewers watching it were sitting on a pouffe being a three-dimensional Windows window.
In many works Pawela takes up self-reflective and self-thematic issues - the problem of the artist as producer and of expectations raised by the art market. Doing this, she also used her own image. In 2004, she made a computer game, Train Your Artist, in which the protagonist answers to the player's orders - paints, sleeps, jokes, prepares an exhibition. In the installation Faster (2005) she replaced the exhibition with its representation on a film registered by CCTV cameras, which was supposed to suggest a theft of the exhibited works, and at the same time, the demand for them. They were completed by an ironic attempt to meet the expectations of the demand - a worker producing with the use of a machine identical images, alluding to Windows style: white windows with a red cross, which signify a system error. In turn, on the exhibition Budżet 500 (Budget 500) in the Arsenal Gallery in Białystok, in 2005, on the screen of the cameras monitoring the space one could see whole objects, while after entering this space one realised that there were only stretchers divided in two and lightboxes - the only things the budget of the institution allowed for.
The problem of the artist as producer was taken up by Pawela during her scholarship in France in 2006. Ridiculing French anxieties related to the afflux of Polish cheap workers, she refurbished a bathroom in the building she lived in and documented it on video. The artist placed herself in the situation of Polish (and not only) emigrants in France. Her work is both funny and critical.
One of the last projects of Pawela is Ubezpieczenie talentu (Talent Insurance, 2005/2006), a film assembled of conversations registered with a hidden camera, which the artist lead with insurance company agents. During the project, which lasted several months, Pawela tried without success to convince her interlocutors to sell her a policy insuring her talent. On her exhibitions the artists presents also photographs and mailing material. The most bitter comment on the situation of artists in Poland was a painting from the Reallaura series entitled Tu nie ma miejsca na sztuke (There Is No Room for Art Here, 2004) - a self-portrait with text, traditionally set in the convention of mobile phone display.