Rising Stars: Meet Lauren Wilcox

Today we’d like to introduce you to Lauren Wilcox.

Lauren, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I was raised between Midwest countryside and small-town life on Lake Michigan. My dad is a practicing furniture designer with strong ties to Grand Rapids and Kendall College of Art and Design. The idea of the “starving artist” wasn’t something I interacted with much – I saw my dad provide for a family of 5 with his creative career and always knew some version of that was the path I’d take. I don’t take for granted the encouragement and support I had from a young age to explore my creative interests.

I achieved a fine art and design associate degree at Grand Rapids Community College as I figured out the direction I wanted to take my career. Ultimately, I moved to Seattle, Washington, and got a BFA in Interior Architecture at Cornish College of the Arts. It felt like a marketable in-between where I could make a living and stay creative on a daily basis. After university, I landed a job at a lighting design firm, a subset of the architecture industry. I’ve been with LUMA since 2019 and am developing my personal fine art and design brand in tandem with my commercial lighting work. It’s been a really nice blend of skills that overlap more than you’d expect.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back, would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I think if anyone says it’s a smooth road they’re lying! Even with great support, I’ve stumbled into plenty of challenges. I think most creatives can relate to the fact that our work is a vulnerable look into our psyche. If I’m changing and growing as a person and my work is tied to that, it’s bound to get messy. It’s cliche, but life throws curve balls; you have to pivot and not take things so personally. That’s definitely easier said than done – I’m actively learning these lessons.

Thanks – so, what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I don’t believe I’ve landed on my specialty or final form as an artist (do we ever?). With that being said, the mediums I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid are paint and paper. When it comes to painting, gouache is my sweet spot. I always come back to its forgivability and blendability! A lot of people consider it a childish medium, but I really appreciate its character. Most recently, I’ve salvaged old terracotta tiles and started painting on those. It’s been a fun experiment adapting my pigment and strokes to something other than paper. For my collage work, I hoard odd paper scraps from anywhere and everywhere. A discarded luggage tag or grocery bag can be repurposed into something new, and I welcome the challenge to give it a fresh identity. I also lean towards old magazines or dated art history books—it’s direct insight into how life used to be and how ideologies change and stay exactly the same all at once.

Whether it’s paper or paint, nature, and feminine energy are overlaid in most of my work, and I use analog and digital techniques to crop, remove or accentuate the female voice. At first glance, my pieces mockingly appease the male gaze, but ultimately my work is for those who push forward despite oppression and fight to reclaim their autonomy. More recently, I’ve been incorporating my own photography into my collage work. Photography isn’t my most developed creative skill set, but it’s something I really enjoy.

My lighting design work sometimes feels far removed from my fine art practices, but ultimately, it’s not. I think understanding composition and color theory are two huge similarities. It’s also incredibly important in both realms of design to understand why you’re making a creative decision and being able to speak to it. When I’m forming a space with light, I’m often taking an abstract idea and turning it into something more concrete or tangible. When I’m working on a collage, I’m doing the opposite; taking a developed concept or image and breaking it apart into something abstract. Each informs the other.

Contact Info:

• Website: laurenrwilcox.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/laurenraewilcox/
• Other: https://lumald.com/ 

Image Credits
Leah Wilcox