Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Carly Shaw

Hi Lauren Carly, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.

As child, I often found myself lost in daydreams, more captivated by the beauty of picking wildflowers during little league games than by the game itself. I thrived in hands-on experiences, whether it was assisting my dad with home improvement projects or baking with my mom, creating delightful messes in the kitchen. Growing up in a family passionate about construction and design, my childhood was filled with the vibrant chaos of renovation, moving from one fixer-upper to the next, which deeply influenced my understanding of creativity and craftsmanship.

My hometown’s rich arts program nurtured my artistic inclinations from a young age, particularly thanks to a high school ceramics teacher who inspired me to pursue my passion for art. This encouragement propelled me to the School of Visual Arts, where I transitioned from graphic and 3D design to an intense exploration of sculpture, stripping away utilitarian elements to delve into the esoteric and philosophical aspects of my work. After college I was fortunate to attend a residency type workshop in Barcelona, Spain where I had a shared studio in a global community. I was able to work as an artists assistant for two really prolific and talented Catalan artists while there and had the opportunity to learn hands on about mold making and casting processes for many different types of materials. When I returned to NY, I landed in Bushwick amidst a growing and exciting arts scene. I exhibited a bunch, culminating in my first solo show at Wave Hill in the Bronx right before I headed off to San Francisco for graduate school at The San Francisco Art Institute (RIP).

My education at SFAI was rooted in concept, theory and philosophy. My work took an interesting turn experimenting with performance, digital integration and installation. Back in Bushwick by 2016, I immersed myself in creating large abstract figurative sculptures for surreal installations that worked in tandem with augmented reality software. I was re-engaged with the NY arts scene and started to show a bit more resulting in some momentum right before the pandemic hit. I was in a fabulous three person show in TriBeCa in early 2020 and received a residency as part of the inaugural cohort that same year with Silver Arts Project which redefined my artistic approach. I wanted to scale back and make less involved and arduous environments. Since then I have been making in the same cyclical way, I find myself making objects now that seem to be nodding toward interaction or installation.

I’ve relocated to upstate NY with my husband, a talented painter, to a charming home with an attached barn, where we continue to work on our art. Excitingly, we are now anticipating the arrival of our first child, whom we affectionately refer to as our best collaboration yet.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?

I have been really fortunate to have the support and encouragement of friends and family since I was first interested in art. Being able to study in three major creative cities with inspirational teachers and peers is a priviledge I do not take lightly. However, like most artists, big elements of my work are rooted in emotion and when you are going through something tough it is very difficult to extract or remove the personal element of the making from the objects themselves. At the time of the greatest momentum for my career and work, I was dealing with the death of my mother which just preceded the pandemic. The layered grief and confusion from this time led me into a pretty severe depression in which I wanted nothing to do with art making. A lot of people (peers, family, therapists etc.) told me to continue to dig in, or process through my work, and while that can be helpful in certain moments, I found it incredibly suffocating during such a significant period of grief. The added pressure of having achieved some goals, having some attention, and having momentum made me feel a responsibility to push those feelings down, produce and perform which I think just made my depression worse, and my work suffer. I have since done a lot of processing and am happily back in my studio making a ton of work that seems to be showing me a new road for my work to walk down.

I think it’s hard for artists these days in a culture of constant production, voyeurism, and social media first to keep up with what seems like an unreasonable pace and second to escape the external ideals of art making/success and root back inside to what made one want to make work in the first place. The persona of artist is one part of an identity that often contains a complex and varied system of jobs, relationships and balance. I have struggled with this throughout my career, wondering what metric is the one to measure against for the true value of what makes one an artist (or a good artist) and how to feel fulfilled in an increasingly competitive world.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?

I am interested in the body. I am interested in it’s intelligibility, objectness, ability to adapt, politics, malleability and its evolution(s). My work reinterprets elements from the human form, other animals, inanimate objects, and synthetic materials. Using cast replications or constructed likenesses of the body in conjunction with other relatable objects and materials, I am able to manipulate the appearance or context of the human. I create hypothetical humanoid forms that often are uncanny enough to mimic the presence of a human, while simultaneously bizarre in a way that dismantles the base understanding of what the human is. The forms become manifestations of imagined evolutions or mysterious mythological creatures leaving one to consider their own potential for adaptation in the future.

I make chimeric forms. I have been working on two bodies of work which both deal with the idea of human mutation and evolution. I start by either using a cast replication of a part of a real human and through an assemblage process hand build the rest of the form. The body casts are combined with abstracted forms made of wood and foam or found objects. The life-size figures are either distorted to create a potential new human body or covered in a variety of nontraditional media such as synthetic hair, flocking, crystals, or silicone. I am most interested in the material translation of the body; from flesh to synthetic, from fabricated to recycled, from whole to disjointed and how these translations will open up new questions in the work and its place in the ‘post human’. I am particularly interested in the disembodiment of form, the intelligibility of objects and materials, and how those elements together ask questions about the human experience. When our form becomes an object and loses its sentience, why is it still regarded as human? What is object-ness? Furthermore, these hypothetical evolutions often begin to interact in surreal and bizarre installations. The surreal and bizarre settings offer an origin story for the still objects and how they might relate to each other. Being interested in the uncanny valley, I have also explored adding some kinetic elements to the sculptures. I have worked with augmented reality for this purpose before, and would be interested to see how real (in person) movement would effect the experience of interacting with my work.

Do you any memories from childhood that you can share with us?

Chasing seagulls and digging for hermit crabs in the surf at cape cod during sunset.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.laurencarlyshaw.com
• Instagram: laurencarlyshaw