Lauren Naomi

Lauren Naomi was born in Massachusetts in 1975 and spent her childhood there in the suburbs until 1993 when she relocated to New York City.  She received her BA in Psychology with a Visual Arts Concentration from Barnard College, Columbia University, in 1997.  In 2004, she received her MA in Art/Art Education from Teachers College, Columbia University.

Explorative iterations through a language of clay petals delve into themes that include nature and the outer world, the inner worlds of thought, perception, and mood, and how the two connect.  Structurally, works play with density, repetition, flexibility, gravity and scale.  An avid, third generation gardener, and fourth generation floral crafter, the petal is my atom.  All my pieces begin with a hand-sculpted clay petal.  Then that petal is built upon with more petals and turned into a rose, or instead pulled to create a flimsy petal and then built upon to make a tipsy rose, or instead left to itself and pulled and smashed and stretched against the canvas like a paint stroke.  Or the petal is turned on its side like a sleeping child with many other sleeping children- or left alone- or rolled into itself to resemble some sea creature or pushed to stand tall with other petals like an army of soldiers, or gently pressed to lean, sway, dance, flit. Or rolled up completely into itself like a ball, the language organically increasing in complexity over time.