My sculptural installations function as alternative archival systems. They generate records through material accumulation, embodied labor, and ecological context rather than through institutional preservation. The work positions landscape as an active archival medium where histories of migration, labor, and environmental transformation converge.

Laura Veles Drey is a multidisciplinary artist based in Houston, Texas, where she was born and raised. Her work draws on domestic craft traditions and materials historically linked to agriculture and food transport. Thread, needles, scissors, burlap, polypropylene sacking, and twist ties serve as structural elements in expansive sculptural environments. Through sewing, weaving, embroidery, and accumulation, her work highlights labor as both a subject and a method—an embodied practice where time, care, and repetition are materially inscribed.

Across these installations, the movement of food, bodies, and labor offers a lens to explore how migration, race, class, and economic policy are interconnected. By linking large-scale agricultural and political infrastructures to intimate forms of making and food knowledge, her work exposes how systems of production rely on intergenerational labor and cultural continuity.

Drey’s installations act as spatial propositions—sites where material, landscape, and memory merge—positioning sculpture as a living archive that holds ecological, cultural, and historical knowledge.

Drey holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BA (Honors) from the University of St. Thomas. In 2019, Laura received support from The Warhol Foundation's Idea Fund for her research project Unsettled Space—By Way of the Crop. She has exhibited at Artpace (Texas, 2025), the Redbud Art Center (Texas, 2024), the Anya and Andrew Shiva Gallery (New York, 2024), Asia Society Texas (Texas, 2021), and MECA (Texas, 2019).