Art Personal StatementLauren Maxey

Through my practice I aim to document, expose and share reality in both a true and a surreal sense, in order to reveal occurrences and experiences that are both tangible and perceivable as well as those that are not. I aim to expose an array of different realities that are not always noticed or reflected upon, in which I attempt to create a platform, to invite people into.Looking through a lens reflects the way I look at my surroundings, in a concentrated manner, using a single scope to view what is happening around me. It allows me to document minute and overlooked details, occurrences or patterns within nature, landscapes and features in both humans and non-human entities.

My personal study covers Grand Masters such as Monet, Van Gogh and Gaudi for their respective study of nature and geometry. This has influenced my painting, which is one of my greatest pleasures, by giving meaning and measure to patterns of continuing forms found in nature. I have been inspired to research the mathematical ideas and works of the likes of Leonardo Da Vinci, Fibonacci and Euclid. More recently, I have been inspired by the body of work from Ana Mendieta and the specific work ‘Line describing a Cone’ by Anthony McCall and how this work challenges the boundaries of three mediums, film, sculpture, and drawing, resulting in the meaning of the work through the experience of that form.

I have studied natural phenomenon’s that science represents through equations and diagrams. For instance, the way light enters a dewdrop and refracts in order for us to perceive it, or the work of theoretical physicist Giorgio Parisi at the University of Rome and his mathematical study of starling murmurations. I use these stimuli to create works in sculpture, film and paintings.I utilize painting and drawing to depict theories, notions or quotes I read, reading transforms to images within my mind which I like to duplicate onto a canvas, it also allows me to purely materialize my imagination through the way I abstract shape and colour in my mind.

The documentational use of photography and film allows me to deploy a sense of preserving and highlighting occurrences and minute organisms that are overlooked, and therefore missed in our every day lives. By giving them the entire focus of my lens I invite them to a platform that exposes their universe.This private universe that I witness and experience is what I like to expose and preserve, ultimately instilling a sense of higher status to this incident. The process emphasizes its movement, shape and colour and creates beauty in the process, by violating its natural order of wanting to disappear through time, for example, capturing the emotion of a human being that will inevitably change, just as the shape of a shadow changes with the movement of the sun or moon.