Bio

Lauren Packard is a mixed media artist living in Brooklyn. After undergoing brain surgery in 2014, she turned to paint to express what words couldn’t. Lauren considers her work an extension of her inner thoughts and dialogue, both conscious and subconscious. Lauren’s work explores and abstracts ideas and memories of queer identity, domesticity, repair, and dissonance through the use of materials and intuitive marks.

Lauren is a recipient of the ChaNorth Chashama Residency and Starry Night Residency award, as well as a finalist for the Artists With Anxiety residency. Her work has been exhibited at Collar Works, 5-50 Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, Paradice Palase, La Bodega Gallery, LIC Arts, Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, and Williamsburg Historical Society. She was a participant performer in the winning Venice Biennale Golden Lion Lithuanian Pavilion Sun and Sea. Her work has been featured in I Like Your Work, Fresh Paint Magazine and Makers Magazine.

Statement

My lived experience as a queer female and recovery from unexpected brain surgery in 2014 are integral to my work. After undergoing brain surgery it it was difficult to communicate verbally and I turned to paint. I was able to say in paint what I couldn't in words. I use abstraction to examine the tension between material/emotion, and language/memory; juxtaposing rawness and order, soft and hard, structured and unrefined. I explore queerness, nostalgia, and femininity as I disorient and disrupt through a combination of marks, textures, and material, referencing punk, Riot Grrrl culture, and the Domestic.

After brain surgery color became intensified for me and I have continued examining the clash and harmony of different color combinations in my paintings. I build relationships with color while waiting for a painting to reveal itself viscerally. Some pieces contain a quiet rage that ebbs and flows as I decompress and process memories and change, searching for an understanding or balance. There is a history in the layering of paint. I’m interested in allowing materials and elements to play and rebel against one another until they become whole. In each piece there is a vulnerability and power that needs to emerge.  

In my assembled collage paintings I create through the relationship of seemingly unconnected fabrics full of memory and history that take on new identities and narratives in their combination. I like combining and organizing disparate parts into a whole as much as I like deconstructing and tearing apart pieces. When I lay out pieces of a painting, some colors and marks navigate to the front while others fade quietly, allowing balances and tensions to feel accentuated. Different temporalities emerge in their combination, revealing time and history through folds, touches, stains, and piercings. Similar to my surgery, I take things apart and fasten them back together, as a form of reclamation and healing searching for alternative expressions. There is a punk attitude of defiance, invoking resistance and rebirth in each piece; a queering of the abstract.

https://www.laurenpackardart.com/