Lauren Clay (b. 1982) toys with the physical and the virtual; her process of working is a dance between the two which combines painting, sculpture, architecture, and design to re-envision their potential for spatial contrast, fantasy, and confusion.

Clay’s process transforms small collages of hand-marbled paper into an immersive floor-to-ceiling environment which she creates digitally, and then translates back into a physical space; or in this instance: a virtual space. The wallpaper installations acquire a double layer of illusionistic yet improbable spaces floating on a background of seemingly never-ending undulating stripes of colour.

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Lauren Clay received a MFA in Painting from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2007, and BFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art in 2004. Clay is currently in residence at Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation in Roswell, New Mexico.

Clay was a 2019 recipient of the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant, and a 2020 recipient of a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

She has exhibited both nationally and internationally. In 2019, her site-specific installation Cenotaph was included in Peter Halley’s solo project, “Heterotopia I” in Venice, Italy, in conjunction with the Venice Biennale. Recent exhibitions include “The Shoo Sho” curated by Julie Curtiss at Anton Kern’s WINDOW gallery in 2021, and solo exhibition, “While Sleeping Watch” at Cris Worley Fine Art, Dallas, Texas in 2020. In 2019 she created a collaborative installation with Peter Halley titled “QUBE” which was exhibited at Gallery Kula in Split, Croatia.

Her work has been reviewed in Art Forum, The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, Artsy, and the Washington Post. Her editioned artist book, Subtle Body, is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The National Museum of Art, Walker Art Center, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art.