My mother’s long-gone apartment bathroom vanity now remains a vessel of recollections. Pinched from clay, touched and imperfect, hidden artifacts emerge through memories’ alchemy. Relics carry a legacy of dismantling and reconstruction where meaning and purpose shift. Our domestic objects archive cultural evidence as ancestral histories entwine with present moments. With context and narrative, I engender to create from this metaphoric debris. Through fragmented forms, allegoric containers and mundane assemblages, I explore mutable topographies of interior obfuscated terrain and exterior dominant perspectives to share stories erased. In this liminal space, I question our fixed notions of capacity and implicate our assumptions of normal, beauty, and worth.
The discursive vessel conjures the individual and collective body, and the axis upon which viewpoint and significance turn. With archetypal pots and traditional genre, I demythologize status and inscribe substance in detritus. Bifurcation depicts colonialism, as parasitic teacups proliferate to engulf a water bowl. A tureen contains a magical folktale with a soup of interdependence in which we all have nourishment to offer. I examine the place of isolation in juxtaposition to the external world, and investigate containment through interior tableau. A series of windowsills delineate the plane and constraints, while the frame shapes our perceptions. Drawn to the still life and its ongoing transformation, I invoke the parallels to ceramic arts through mutual themes of everyday representation and marginalized critical reception. Both genres convey impermanence with prosaic landscapes.
Through conjoined historic pots torn and layered bit-by-bit, I interweave form, content, and materiality. I envision the ubiquitous nature of clay across era, contemplate replication as the gesture of the hand, and conjure convergence. My work occupies the struggle at the precipice where oppositional elements meet. At the interstice of structure and residue, remnants unravel multiple truths, as clay provides a spectrum of possibility where lives manifest in everyday moments and overlooked corners.
— Lauren Sandler
Bio
Originally from New York City, Lauren’s felt sense developed through the contrast of the city’s prodigious exterior, to the small space of her family’s apartment, and later the panorama of the mountains. Her work finds an affinity in the place where visceral and structural meet, the struggle at the precipice where oppositional elements converge, an intersection of body and environment, with the mundane as monumental.
Drawn to the quiet expanse of nature, Lauren makes a home in upstate New York. She embraces her role as educator, presents lectures and workshops, and exhibits nationally. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from Penn State University, and undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Ceramics from Ithaca College and SUNY New Paltz, respectively. She currently teaches at Skidmore College.
