Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident 2011
Lauren Mayer grew up in New England in Southern New Hampshire, raised with a love for the land, the snow, and solitude offered by the hush of the woods. This connection to the land followed her from state to state throughout my education. Lauren received my BFA in ceramics from Michigan State University and a post-baccalaureate degree in ceramics from the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. She continued on to the glorious state of Colorado, where she lived and worked for 15 years after moving out West for graduate school at CU, Boulder where Lauren received my MFA.
Lauren has taught at a number of schools including, Metropolitan State University of Denver , CU, Boulder, The University of Denver. Lauren is currently an Associate Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Colorado Mountain College at the Aspen/Carbondale campuses. She has shown her work nationally and internationally.
Along with teaching and ceramics, vegetable farming, stewardship of the soil, and food has also been an integral part of Lauren’s life. Since 2009, each year of teaching has been dovetailed with working on an organic veggie farm from early spring to late fall. There, she worked in the fields and managed the CSA food share program at Red Wagon Farm, who provides local veggies to the Boulder/Denver area. For her, the physical labor of farming is akin to the freedom of woods and flow state that emerges in making, another means to shaking ideas loose and working the problem.
I use the language of accumulation, fossilization, and the void to explore how time visually manifests itself in the physical world. 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 for the visual language to describe the complex human experience within an everyday fleeting moment to the sublimely infinite.
I seek to describe the formless – the elusiveness of the present, the shapelessness of memory. My current work embodies moments that exist peripherally, the interstice between tactility and absence, permanence and impermanence, past and future. They are veritable timelines, core samples of thought and action. The voids are the pause of a breath, each layer a word in a poem, each color a moment of change. Together they become stratified artifacts of pure process, chance and happenstance, a moment captured, a moment lost, a moment that will have always been, an historical future. Through the work, I become an archeologist of memory and an architect of a time.