Bosse & Baum is pleased to present Persephone, the first solo exhibition by American artist Lauren Clay in the UK.

Expounding on Persephone’s archetypal figure and the realm of Underworld as the psychic unconscious, the exhibition showcases a new body of work of wall-based and free-standing sculpture, works on paper and a site-specific wall installation in Clay’s curving, architectural style.  

Clay’s practice is situated at the crossroads of sculpture and print-making. The latter is connected both with painting and the art of marbleization, but also with the digital realm; after the small pieces of paper are marbleized, Lauren digitally manipulates them in order to create all-enveloping architectural environments. Similarly, her process of creating her sculptures conceals various slippages between media: a traditional or digital drawing is turned into a sculpture, which is then painted and sometimes marbleized. The very foundation of Lauren Clay’s material practice is based on liminality, metamorphosing flatness into three-dimensionality and the physical into virtual, while blurring the borders in between. 

Lauren’s experimentations with matter function like portals towards the spiritual and seek to translate the physical into psychic terms, encouraging introspective wanderings. Hence the recurring motif of architectural ‘openings’ in her artistic vocabulary: windows, doorways and arches multiply, leading the gaze towards the invisible. In Jungian tradition, psychological structures manifest themselves in dreams through architectural ensembles, so when one dreams of a House, the latter represents the psyche of the dreamer. Lauren’s inclusion of architectural fragments in otherwise abstract environments echoes this vision. Her wallpaper transforms the gallery into a material incarnation of one’s psyche: a theater inhabited by archetypes.  

These archetypal sculptures dive deep into the ocean of the collective psyche and combine mythological themes with art historical references. Modernist inspirations neighbor flashbacks from Renaissance or Baroque art and architecture, which in turn, border medieval and Celtic themes. Her labyrinthine works find the intersection between the rational and the irrational, engaged in constant movement and an endless internal search. 

Persephone navigates universal themes to illuminate the depths of the psyche through its darkest Shadow, and bring some wholesomeness into today’s fragmented, complicated and partially broken world. 

Elena Sorokina