Lauren Davies
After receiving an MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute, Lauren Davies spent decades in California as both an artist and non-profit gallery director before returning to her Rust Belt roots and relocating to Cleveland. Over the past decade, this geographic shift has expanded her approach to artmaking by integrating historical research into experimental works that combine photography, sculpture, and textiles.
Recent projects include Industry Unraveled, a photo-textile exploration of abandoned manufacturing sites throughout the Rust Belt, and Incarceration: Solitary Objects, a photo-textile investigation of a condemned prison in Ohio.
Lauren is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Emerging Artist Award and multiple Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards. Her work has been exhibited at Transformer Station, SHED Projects, the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery, the Fuller Craft Museum, Jack Fischer Gallery, and the Rust Belt Biennial. She has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo (2024), the Wurlitzer Foundation (2023), and the Joan Mitchell Center (2022), as well as at MASS MoCA, the California Academy of Sciences, Santa Fe Art Institute, and Djerassi Resident Artists Program.
Lauren lives and works in a historic paper mill village near Cleveland, Ohio.
Artist Statement
My mixed media works employ an experimental approach to unconventional materials that integrates craft, sewing, sculpture, and photography into diverse compositions that comment on regional histories, economic decline, incarceration, and environmental concerns. The works propose alternative narratives for personal, cultural, and institutional histories, distinguished by a striking materiality and somewhat ironic perspective on the darker undercurrents of contemporary life.
Across multiple projects, I generally begin with photographic site documentation that captures peculiar, revealing moments in the landscape and architectural interiors that speak to the layered histories of place. Many of these sites have been photographed while I was an artist-in-residence in New Mexico, New Orleans, and upstate New York. The photographic documentation is at times presented as a standalone body of work before being translated into textiles and sculpture-based compositions.
Included images represent visual mirage experiences at Georgia O’Keeffe’s Ghost Ranch in remote Northern New Mexico and an isolated church in an abandoned Southern Colorado town. At the other end of the spectrum are photographs from the opulent Yaddo Mansion in Saratoga Springs, New York, where the reputed lingering of the long-deceased Trask family adds an uncanny dimension to the site’s storied past.
https://www.laurendaviesprojects.com
