Artist in Residence: August - September 2023

Lauren is a British, Portuguese visual artist living and working in the UK. She graduated from London Southbank University with a first-class Honours Degree in Film, focusing her dissertation on ‘The External Representation of the Psyche in Visual Art’. She works to make the invisible qualities of the mind and soul visible through photographic self-portraits taken through an expressionist lens. Her work deals with mental health, the subconscious and multiplicity.

The limitations of the space around her inspires her to look inwards creating new worlds, through the mind’s eye, achieved predominantly through photo manipulation. In her later series, she chose to focus on in-camera distortion using a long exposure, a technique she has been working with for nine years. Inspired predominantly by painters such as Edvard Munch and Francis Bacon, she uses her skin as the paint and her movement and emotions as the brush, giving faces to different energies and complex emotions. She enhance these images, bringing out only that which is already there. For her installation work, she strings together separate frames to produce a final multifaceted portrait of a subject in flux between emotional states.