Lauren Willis
BA (Hons) Fine Art
Lauren Willis is an artist living and working in Manchester, UK. Rooted in process, her practice explores methods of documenting the personal and hidden meanings held by found objects. Viewing them as souvenirs, she is interested in how they give the collector ownership of universal and, at the same time, extremely specific moments past. Her work is an intersection of printmaking and metalworking; the respective histories of these processes and their materials are embodied in the work through traces, allusions to making being as foundational to Lauren’s installations as the objects which they record. Drawing on the surreal, such objects are communicated with mysticism and subtlety, appearing only as suggestions. Both their identity and their route into the work remains unclear because of the ways in which etching and casting processes are appropriated and disrupted by the artist. Still, a sense of familiarity endures. Through a casual approach installation and the creation of delicate surfaces, Lauren suggests an existing intimacy between the viewer and the artwork. It is through this notion of opposition, between the ambiguous and the inviting, that her work becomes an embodiment of our relationship to objects: immaterial and transcendent.
