Above: Lauren Mayer, “There is no room for me to rest in a thief”
In much of Lauren’s work, she explores memory, trace, and metaphor through furniture, as can be seen in the piece for this year’s Triennial, “There is no room for me to rest in a thief,” a chair made of porcelain. In her newest work, she has been exploring the realtionship between furniture and the body.
Mayer writes:
“I am intrigued by the routines and habits that surround the things with which we live and how those routines are cerebrally and tactilely manifest in the real and made object.”
Lauren continues on to say that these objects — like beds or chairs — become almost like extensions of our own bodies through our daily use of them. A good way to understand this aspect of her work is by thinking of that sensation we’ve all experienced of sitting down on a chair that is shorter than we expected. For a split second, you feel like you’re free-falling, until you hit the surface. In this way, a “bodily expectation” exists, created through endless repetition and built in to our muscle memory and embedded in our bodies. Currently in her work, Lauren is exploring the chair as a metaphor for “the emotional human body.”
You can read more about Lauren and see other examples of her work at www.laurenmayersstudios.com