Lauren Davies Projects

Artist Statement

I frequently employ an experimental approach to unconventional materials by integrating craft, sewing, sculpture, and photography into a diverse range of works that comment on regional histories, economic decline and environmental concerns. These works present alternative narratives for personal, cultural, and institutional histories that are characterized by a distinctive materiality and an ironic perspective on the dark underbelly of contemporary life.

 My recent projects, “Isolated Objects” and “Industry Unraveled”, feature photographs of abandoned sites that I have captured throughout the Rust Belt. The work presents graphically bold images that are transformed into woven textiles by processing image files into digitally woven versions of my photographs. Subsequently, I deconstruct the photographic weavings by selectively extracting threads from the woven image, combined with hand-dyeing, bleaching, and manual collage that employs both hand-sewing and a sewing machine. This amalgamation of processes creates a visual effect that suggests the image is dematerializing and unraveling into a pile of disconnected threads cascading towards the floor.