Laurence Herfs (1994) is a visual artist, essayist and academic researcher from The Netherlands. She obtained a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Royal Academy of Arts The Hague in 2021, an RMA in Arts and Culture from Leiden University in 2020 and a BA in Liberal Arts and Sciences from University College Utrecht in 2015.
With her work, Herfs investigates the female body in transformation. She interweaves female voices of mythology and demonology with a personal contemporary imagery in order to facilitate a polyphonic cross-temporal dialogue about the ways in which the female body has been allowed to take space. She connects and merges pre-existing images and archetypes with representations of her own body, because those pervasive images of womanhood are personal to her: as a queer artist, she has long adored, absorbed and internalised them as simultaneously an expression of the self and the desired other; as part of her own gender expression, as well as of her sexuality. Transformed under these pressures, her images seek to hold space between the intersections of inviting and alienating that desiring gaze.