Lauren Chipeur is an artist based in Calgary on Treaty 7 Territory and Tio’tia:ke/Montréal. Her work engages with material temperaments and biographies; how materials behave, what they are made of and where they come from. This process builds systems that untangle or distill new ways to know things in order to understand the material world better, or differently. In current research she uses clay, cosmetics, waste/found materials and found information to develop experimental clay and glaze recipes. This probing locates ceramic processes as a lens to reflect on how we come to know ourselves and our world.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My work engages with material temperaments and biographies; how materials behave, what they are made of and where they come from. This takes the form of sculpture/installation made using ceramics and found materials. I pursue moments of contact and links between materials in order to understand a world that is concealed from view. Corporate interests seek to distort our relationship with the surfaces, substances and stuff of our everyday. This investigation of the everyday allows me to interrogate our unavoidable relationship with the systems that constitute us. My activities offer one way to understand our place on the consumption end of the current systems of production.
