Lauren Doss
MA Fine Art
I am a British-American performance artist, making work that explores the body in space. Synthesising elements of movement, sound, film, sculpture and drawing my work emerges from an embodied process. Inducing a heightened sense of awareness, I perform tasks and improvisations connecting directly between internal and external environments. I am interested in trying to dissolve any barrier between a studio and performance space.
Through exploring how the human experience of everyday life transforms into performance, I integrate elements of German Tanztheater and improvisation into a sensory language and framework for generating work across mediums. Extending beyond the ephemeral existence of performance, I am interested in the memory of different materials and how they can be used to capture movement and record a moment of action, creating kinetic documents in one simultaneous process.
The Creature series of MA work discusses the seen and unseen and is an imagined conversation between the inner female voices of Virginia Woolf, St Julian of Norwich, Margery Kempe and my own. It is not a verbal dialogue, but one manifested through movement, sound, image, absence, and, most importantly, presence. The work explores some of the issues of living with the pandemic, mental health and the contrast between our internal and external worlds, with the body as the interface between the two. I’m fascinated by the use of film, and its ability to manipulate our sense of time. Within the work I play with using film and binaural sound, to capture and convey a visceral experience.
