Lauren Mayer

BIOGRAPHY

Lauren Mayer is a ceramic artist and teacher, who grew up in New Hampshire and raised with a love for the land and solitude offered by the natural landscape. This connection to the land followed her to Colorado, where she lived and worked for 15 years after moving out West for graduate school at CU, Boulder, where I received my MFA in 2009. For over a decade, Lauren taught at several institutions as an adjunct professor in the Boulder/Denver area at Metropolitan State University of Denver and CU, Boulder. The last year has been one of change. The summer of 2021she moved to Washington State to work as a studio artist, returned to CO as an artist-in-residence at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in fall/winter of 2021, and Lauren is now spending the summer of 2022 as a studio assistant at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts in Maine. This fall, she will begin teaching at Colorado Mountain College in Aspen, CO.

ARTIST STATEMENT

I use the language of accumulation, fossilization, and the void to explore how time visually manifests itself in the physical world and how we as humans experience, perceive and record its passage in our bodies and the internal landscape of our minds in the form of memory. Physics, psychology, and philosophy surrounding the nebulous mechanics of time and the push and pull of the non-linear chronology of memory continually inform how I think about my work. I look to the ordered stratifications found in the geologic landscape, which is the record of the memory of the earth, for the visual language to help describe the complex expanse of human experience within an everyday fleeting moment to the sublimely infinite.  

Clay itself is a material manifestation of geologic time and I use it for its conceptual ability to record, document, reveal, and transform. Using handbuilding, casting, slip dipping, and cold working techniques, I seek to describe the formless – the elusiveness of the present, the shapelessness of memory. I want to give physical form to the more intangible, unquantifiable human experiences. The ones that exist peripherally in the interstice between moments of tactility and absence, permanence and impermanence, past and future, perception and reality. Each is known by the presence of other, in the state of between. With a multi-faceted approach to the material of clay, I seek to create pieces that balance in these less absolute spaces – between the familiar and the abstract, the formal and the metaphor, the natural landscape and inhabited architectural spaces of our human perceptions.  

Throughout the making process, the discarded materials produced from creating these pieces are scraped and collected from all surfaces and containers in the studio and cast in plaster molds. They become self-referential core samples of pure process, a veritable timeline of my thoughts and actions within the studio, a resetting of the clock. The resulting striations, the cracks, fissures, the moments of almost-failure preserved in each core sample are a record of a day, a week, a month of making in the studio. The voids are the pause of a breath, each layer a word in a poem of fleeting thought, each color a moment of change. The intangible and unquantifiable have a form. They become stratified artifacts of a moment. They are only revealed when they are cut post-firing with a wet saw, an undeniably violent way of unearthing their subtle, personal secrets. Through the work, I become an archeologist of memory and an architect of a time.  

Website: www.laurenmayerstudios.com 
Instagram @lauren.n.mayer