With a background in photography, Laureana Toledo's practice has developed to incorporate various media, chosen in relation to a specific concept or theme of the work. Laureana is inspired by the imperceptible or transient moments of the everyday, speculating on how such phenomena can gain new forms of visual presentation. Her work often involves systematic and repetitive interventions into different media (texts, books, photographs etc.) to re-code their existing narratives.

An example is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1999), where Toledo replaced all the vowels in Lewis Carrol's book with coloured dots. This creates a visual narrative directly on the text, offering an alternative reading of the book. Similarly, in Migratory Patterns (1999-2003) she photographed several flocks of migratory birds only to cut them out of the picture, creating geometrical compositions determined by the distribution of the birds.

 

Laureana also takes this approach into her exploration of the history of rock music, one of her passions. For ART SHEFFIELD 05: Spectator T, she formed The Limit, a Mexican cover-band that borrowed its name from a Sheffield cult rock venue of the eighties. The Limit interpreted songs of popular local bands such as Def Leppard, Pulp and The Human League and toured to Sheffield where they performed to local audiences. This work looks at the processes of a local phenomenon 'gone global'. By taking the music back to Sheffield Laureana shows how it has acquired new layers of meaning.