Lauren Elder

Lauren Elder is an interdisciplinary artist originally from Los Angeles and currently based in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Across ceramics, sculpture, and printmaking, she repetitively works and reconstructs her materials into ornate surfaces and assemblages. Through this insistent layering, she builds storied landscapes of cultural memory and personal mythology that slip between past and present, real and imagined. Elder received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Arkansas. Her work has been exhibited internationally in London, Hong Kong, New York, Chicago, Amsterdam, Toronto, and Los Angeles, as well as at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art. She is a recent recipient of the Sturgis Grant and was an artist-in-residence at CRETA, Rome, Italy, this summer.

Artist Statement: Born to one of the oldest tribes in Iraq, the Mezrahis, on my maternal side, and one of Scotland’s coats of arms, the Elders, on my paternal side, my practice embraces these legacies through its commitment to hybridity, illusion, and myth. Los Angeles, with its architectural film sets and where my immigrant family set up a flourishing fashion boutique, further informs my tendencies toward ornament and decoration. My elaborate assemblages that combine ceramic, steel, and inscribed found objects play with how collective memories and cultural archetypes transform across place and time. I am interested in the space between past and present, where histories overlap and fragments come together to form new narratives. Rather than illustrating a single story, my work creates spaces where meaning is built through layering, transformation, and the process of making itself.