Lauren E. Peters on Identity, Costumes, and Creative Growth — Podcast and Interview
We’re excited to share an in-depth feature and podcast interview with Lauren E. Peters, a Delaware-based visual artist whose self-portraits explore themes of identity, gender, performance, and creative evolution. In this episode of Art & Cocktails, Lauren reflects on her return to painting after a long hiatus, the role of costumes in shaping persona, and the emotional layers behind her vibrant, theatrical work.
We also discuss the realities of balancing a studio practice with a career in the arts, navigating slow creative seasons without guilt, and the power of building a body of work over time. Lauren’s story is a generous and thoughtful exploration of what it means to be an artist today—and a reminder that growth rarely follows a straight line.
Lauren was previously featured in Create! Magazine Issue 51 and is currently a studio artist at The Delaware Contemporary.
Listen to the full conversation below and scroll down to read the full interview.
Photo: Jen Polillo Studios
Your work examines identity and gender through a lens that feels deeply personal yet universally resonant. What initially drew you to this form of self-portraiture, and how has it evolved?
There is so much that goes into the portraits, and I think it’s for that reason that I’ve been able to sustain this project for almost 10 years now. In 2016 I had the opportunity to exhibit in a gallery and had nothing to show, let alone a cohesive body of work. It had been years since I had done any fine art, and seeing a painting by Chantal Joffe in a magazine pushed me toward self-portraiture. I always hated having my picture taken and had this sobering moment of thinking about how I would regret not having many photos of myself in my twenties or even in college.
Mind you, this was also the heyday of the selfie and crafting virtual identities. I had very little desire to join this movement and thought I could make paintings instead—but also get at something about the images being projected as an illusion or false reality.
But wait, there’s more: I also cannot take a personality test to save my life. Working in self-portraiture helped me deal with this conflict between opposing forces of identity that made me feel like I couldn’t pick a side, have a definitive answer, or check a box. Two big ones were masculine vs. feminine and introvert vs. extrovert, which still heavily come into play but have certainly changed over time.
This project has made me more sure of myself in terms of confidence and self-worth, but I can’t say that I’m any better at answering direct questions about my personality or identity. I am just more at home within the uncertainty and nuance, and working from the viewpoint that it’s all a performance. RuPaul’s quote still sums it up perfectly: “We’re all born naked and the rest is just drag.”
Identity seems so nebulous to me, but I fully respect those who have the self-knowledge and trust to define themselves in their own chosen words. Words have just rarely worked for me, so I’ve created my own visual language within which I can express myself in a way that feels true and whole. This project started as a way for me to connect with myself—as I thought this would be my own semi-private exercise—and has evolved into a way for me to connect with others as I put these bolder versions of myself out into the world. The more personal the paintings become, the more universal they feel, as we all respond on a deeper level to someone speaking their truth—that spark of witnessing someone connected to their authentic self.
You speak of costumes as both armor and projection. How do you decide what persona to step into for a given painting?
A bit of backstory will be helpful here, as my practice started years and years before what you can see now. Clothing and textiles are my inherited mother tongue; painting is my chosen language. The family business started by my grandfather was a high-end dry cleaners in the land of the du Pont estates, generating childhood fantasies of the lives that inhabited those wardrobes with an enviable dress-up collection at home.
Before I started painting again, I found myself costuming for a theater as a creative outlet while working (again) in the family business. The language and power of clothing, along with decades of dabbling in theater, was deeply ingrained before I started working in self-portraiture.
Bringing together this background with the modern insecurity of a dueling virtual plane of existence, I feel an increasing pressure to find something real. Using wigs that are used for cosplay or referencing myths featuring heightened experiences are ways to communicate this world that lives just outside our reality. It’s a strange place to be—trying to find something real by way of make-believe and ongoing contradictions that make me feel like it’s useless to try and put this into words. Everything is concurrently real and fake, so why not speak in myths and colors?
It’s impossible to sum up everything that goes into each piece, but I’ll use my most recent painting as an example of what happens along the way. In an ongoing attempt to retell stories of those who have been pigeonholed or relegated to the sidelines, inspired by writers like Natalie Haynes and Rebecca Solnit, I wanted to make a painting about Athena. Athena is not my favorite, but as a woman representing wisdom and war, I felt called to give her a moment of play with some owl puppets from IKEA.
It wasn’t until I was pretty far along in the process (actively painting) that I read that these were not some random symbol associated with wisdom but represented another woman who suffered one of the numerous assaults in Greek mythology and was transformed into an owl. To say that I was devastated is not much of an exaggeration. I wanted to see this woman (Athena) as more than her actions—to set aside judgment and recognize that this person deserved joy and rest. That I created this moment at the expense of another woman, a woman exiled into this form and pictured as a mere plaything, was heartbreaking.
And this is the exact reason I keep going back to Greek mythology: this whole being-a-human thing is often ugly, heartbreaking, and so very complicated. I want to find personas and historical actors that don’t conform to a simple narrative and bring up ideas that move us away from a binary and unexamined way of seeing. Bring on the villains, the complex, the Other, the monsters.
With influences ranging from Greek mythology to vintage textiles, how do you integrate such diverse references into a cohesive visual language?
Breaking it down to its smallest parts, I think the heaviest lifting here is done by my color palette, followed by patterned clothing—but it’s also the same person every time. I’ve always worked well in a system where I’m able to explore how many possibilities exist within a limited number of variables. Utilizing these building blocks of color and pattern with a human figure somewhere in the composition, I have yet to feel confined by this structure as I’m also changing as it moves through my experience.
Beneath all the razzle-dazzle is a very simple formula to hold everything together, and it stays fresh with time as a collaborator.
My process doesn’t seem any different to me than picking out a shirt to wear, out of all the types of shirts in the world, and wanting to listen to a specific song out of all the music and all the genres across time—plus choosing what to eat for lunch while wearing the shirt and listening to the song. Each day is a melting pot of diverse references and roles to play, and we somehow make choices to face the onslaught of information and shifting landscape.
We are surrounded, if not exquisitely and horrifically overwhelmed, by a vast amount of visual data that we’re asked to interpret and then hold in our bodies. Whether I’m referencing a character or story or feeling, I’m trying to get at something about processing the current moment and our shared history. It’s wild, chaotic, and glorious. If we have the gift of sight, our lives—and my paintings—are about integrating this mess into something beautiful.
What does it mean for you to be both an artist and an arts professional—and how do you maintain balance across these roles?
I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this question! Part of me is just so proud to have these jobs, as I had no clue what to do with an art degree after college and ended up in coffee shops and retail. It is also still an unmistakable feeling in my body of what life was like before I started painting again—how painful it was to feel like an outsider to what I cared about the most.
It is very important to me to help emerging artists empower themselves, encourage everyone else along the way as much as possible, and help in any way I can to build community. Finding enough time to get actual painting or creative work done is the most difficult part, so finding the balance is a challenge every single day.
For almost three years I was able to paint full-time, but I always acknowledged that that could change. I try to enjoy whatever stage I’m in, and am thankfully at a point in my life where even something I refer to as my “office job” still allows me to help other artists and learn about the field.
Are there days that I am sobbing in my studio because it feels like too much? For sure. But even if I could afford to be in my studio 100% of the time, I would still be taking on odd jobs to help the arts community at large. It is tough to watch time go by so quickly and not be getting done everything I want to accomplish, but I have no desire to walk this road alone or leave anyone behind that I have the power to bring with me.
What conversations do you hope your work sparks in today’s cultural and social climate?
It had seemed to be the case that my practice was “lower case p” political, as a woman’s body or feminine body has always been political, and art itself is political. However, in this very current climate I may have graduated into the next category.
Knowing that my work could now provoke a response at a national level for speaking about gender as a construct or gender nonconformity is not something I ever imagined taking place, while I still knew those were conversations that needed to be happening. As I particularly care about expressing a bold and multifaceted view of femininity or The Feminine, I want that to go hand in hand with empathy and seeing beyond surface-level beliefs, appearances, or identity tied to social media.
It’s dangerous to fall into a worldview where everything is black and white, dumbed down, and I hope that my work opens a dialogue into how complex and colorful things are when you’re open to allowing something to exist as it is and believes itself to be.
Like everyone else, I am trying to teach myself the lesson to not want something to exist as I see it or what I project onto it.
I identify with the color pink because it has historically been ripe for interpretation. The color pink exists, full stop—but first it’s a color for boys because of its strength, a color for girls to make people think they need to buy duplicate items for children, forced into a triangle as a mark of sexuality, an overall victim to strong opinions.
My use of vibrant color in general is intentional and political. In Chromophobia by David Batchelor, he writes:
“Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue color, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity… colour is made out to be the property of some foreign body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or pathological.”
There are so many conversations to be had about seeing the value and fullness in those unlike ourselves, in trying to recognize each other’s humanity. I am terrible at this when it comes to those who are trying to take away the rights and humanity of others, but I know I need to work against being siloed into an echo chamber of my own.
I am creating work to exist in a world where it’s unnecessary to fall into a particular category and all of identity can be fluid. This is just my story to tell, my imagination at play—which is not to say that I want to impose this loosey-goosey ideology on anyone else. But it is my hope that as long as I’m opening a door to this perspective, it allows other doors and windows and cupboards and umbrellas to open.
Photo: Jen Polillo Studios