04.03.15
Eye Candy
Lauren Clay, Artist
Artist Lauren Clay has a background in painting and printmaking, but her work is hardly confined to the two-dimensional plane. Her body of work began as a series of large paintings on paper. But as she progressed, she became more and more interested in the inherent tendencies of paper to curl away from the wall, and she began to explore the third dimension, bridging the gap between painting and sculpture. We can see this in her delicate cut-out grids on marbled acrylic paper, which naturally curl away from the wall, creating a presence in the viewer’s space and a dialogue between paper and wall, paper and viewer, and 2D vs. 3D. Her experimentations with marbled paper are pushed even further through a series of geometric assemblages — sculptures that are studies in the modernist principles of shape and balance, seemingly defying gravity through a hidden wooden armature. Her most recent pieces incorporate the use of paper pulp, plaster, and papier-maché. Unlike her previous work, these pieces seem to literally grow out of the wall, their white forms matching the whites of gallery walls, embodying a textural quality we can’t get enough of.
