ARTIST BIO

Lauren E. Peters is a visual artist working with the concepts of identity and gender through self-portraiture. She fell head over heels for oil painting in college but after a series of heartbreaks, stopped painting and looked for something “practical” to do. (She did not find it.) Costuming for a theater provided a fun and low-stakes diversion along the way, the appreciation for clothing and textiles a common motif. The family business growing up was a high-end dry cleaners in the land of the prominent du Pont families, generating childhood fantasies of the lives that inhabited those wardrobes with an enviable dress-up collection at home. Hindsight says the transition to costuming herself was obvious and inevitable. Finding her way back to painting in 2015, a small series of self-portraits opened the floodgates. Peters is based in her hometown of Wilmington, Delaware where she lives with her husband, two cats, and a dog named Rosie. She is currently a recipient of a 2023 Fellowship in the painting category from the Delaware Division of the Arts.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Self-portraiture came to me by way of a painting by Chantal Joffe: a bold figure in a drippy red dress whose identity was both obscured and struggling to assert herself. With Cindy Sherman in the rearview, I began staging source photos and then creating oil paintings to join the legacy of portraits staking a claim in existence. The foundation of my practice is an engagement with the construct(ion) and performance of identity and gender, an exploration of how we costume and present ourselves to project a story about the person inside, to hide, or to arm ourselves. Covering our bodies is an assembling of identity; my form the base material upon which I add layers of meaning. I find myself drawn to bright colors and patterns, finding the irony of their flashiness or tackiness on humans and their life-saving camouflage in the natural world. Do we have any more control over how our lives are interpreted? Is this my vanity or my rebirth? History is full of women being judged and condemned when the coin lands on either side, for playing the part of madonna or whore, Lilith or Eve, enchanter or witch. Perception and reality can be at odds or conjoined, concurrently real and fake. We are both Frankenstein and monster. I am drawn to the bold while simultaneously fighting the urge to hide, trying not to lose myself completely.

Wilmington, DE / United States