https://laurenmakingstuff.co.uk/



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Lauren Sturgis Rife

Born in Wilmington, Delaware, and now living in the United Kingdom, my practice is shaped by a childhood spent moving between countries before eventually settling in the UK. These experiences continue to inform my interest in identity, belonging, and self-reflection. I graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the University of Derby in 2006, where I began exploring the body through close-up photography. Since then, the body has remained central to my work, acting as a way to investigate personal experience and questions of self. A recent graduate from UCA Farnham, I continue to explore these themes through sculpture and glass. My work is driven by a sense of searching—an ongoing attempt to understand how identity is formed through memory, place, and lived experience. Through making, I examine my relationship to the world around me, using the body as both subject and material to reflect on presence, absence, and belonging.

My practice explores the relationship between my body, the landscape, and the viewer’s experience. Using the pâte de verre process, I create casts of my own body and place them within outdoor environments, creating unexpected encounters between body, nature, and place.

Nature is central to both my life and my work. I am drawn to creating pieces that are experienced outdoors because I feel most connected to the natural world, and many of my most meaningful experiences of art have taken place within the landscape. By situating my work outside, changing conditions such as light, weather, and season become active collaborators in how the work is encountered.

Using my own body as subject creates a direct physical connection between myself and the work. Through mould-making and casting, I transform fragments of my body into glass forms that exist independently within nature. Through these works, I explore themes of presence, absence, belonging, and transformation, inviting moments of reflection, curiosity, and discovery.