Lauren Fensterstock is an artist, writer, and curator based in Portland, Maine. Lauren’s work is held in private and public collections internationally. Her artwork has been featured in recent exhibitions at The John Michael Kohler Art Center (WI), The Austin Museum of Art (TX), The Bowdoin College Museum of Art (ME), the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design (CA), The Ogunquit Museum of American Art (ME), the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (OR), the Portland Museum of Art (ME), The DUMBO Art Center (NY), and the Oliver Sears Gallery (Ireland).
Outside the studio, Lauren’s curatorial projects and published writings have been featured internationally. Lauren holds degrees from the Parsons School of Design (BFA 1997) and SUNY New Paltz (MFA 2000).
‘Fensterstock’s hand is light, even delicate. Gravel-like accumulations of charcoal clump around an astonishingly realistic “pond” of black Plexiglas, into which one can peer and see, like Narcissus, one’s own dark reflection. The dominant material, however, is paper, which Fensterstock has laboriously cut, curled and folded to form myriad flowers and leaves. The resulting tendrils twirl and tumble with abandon, like coils of ribbons on a birthday gift…This combination of the real and unreal contributes to a charged atmosphere that is as redolent of Victorian ornamental excess as it is creepily futuristic, like the findings of a space shuttle from an as-yet-undiscovered black planet. Both tempting and threatening, Fensterstock creates objects of desire whose beauty draws us in, only to repel with intimations of dark secrets. This tension culminates in an illusion of depth and motion that leaves viewers with the eerie sensation that these shadowy gardens have a sinister life—one that will cause them to grow and change long after we have left the room.’ Carol Diehl, 2010. (excerpt from Radical Sentimentalism: The World of Lauren Fensterstock)