Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident 2012
Born and raised in Northeast Ohio, Lauren Herzak-Bauman holds a Master of Fine Arts degree from The University of Minnesota, Twin Cities (2009) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bowling Green State University in Ohio (2004). Recent exhibitions include at The Sculpture Center in Cleveland, Ohio at The Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin, and Deviations from Comfort at the Seattle Design Center, Seattle Washington. She is the recipient of the Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship, awarded to 5 Minnesota artists annually. Lauren teaches art and design at University of Wisconsin-River Falls, and keeps a studio in the former Canada Dry bottling warehouse close to the Mississippi in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
I’m okay and I’m not okay. Every day I am one or the other, and many times I hover between, learning to cope with cataclysmic personal losses. Making things in clay links these shifting states of emotional being to a materiality, documenting and communicating a struggle primarily shared in private spaces. This constant shifting state is interpreted and digested through the use of clay to create a poetic gesture.
Porcelain is intrinsically connected with ideas of strength and fragility. When used in the context of urban detritus, old attic finds, and aged and broken objects, porcelain becomes a metaphor for presence and absence, death and loss. Working spontaneously or in a stream of conscious manner allows raw emotion and gesture to emerge through the material.