Lauren May is an artist from New Zealand, working in both painting and sculpture. The experience of being in a body is a central predicament in her practice, emerging as a tension between the wondrous and the uncomfortable; a central concern that recurs across her work.

In her paintings, she addresses depiction as an act of intimacy and vulnerability, and the power dynamics of being seen. Painted in oil, and rendered with a hyperreality, the work is concerned with the barrier between subject and observer, and the vulnerability inherent to being represented.

Her sculptural practice includes a material inquiry through materials with an innate bodily quality and poetic resonance. Mold making, resin, silicon, polymer clay, and recently glass, these materials are adopted for their bodily quality, seeming to transcend physicality and alluding to the otherworldly, while carrying an undercurrent of the abject.

Fairy tales and their strange symbolism are an  ongoing subject matter in her work. Looking at specific narratives and archetypes, including Cinderella, Rapunzel, the mill pond nixie, and, most recently, giants,  texts are examined and confronted through sculpture, surfacing their uncanny imagery, charged, symbolic and tugging at something unconscious.

During her time at GlogauAIR she is continuing these explorations in both painting and sculpture, looking at the archetype of the giant in her sculptural work, and the concept of the veil in her paintings.