Artist Statement/ Biography

Spawned from ideas of desire and intimacy in relation to ecology, Lauren Pirie’s paintings, sculptures and installations illuminate both our inherent interdependence and a thirst for communion with the more-than-human. She is fascinated by symbiotic—both mutualistic and parasitic—relationships in nature, and how they challenge reductive colonial binaries, hierarchies, and attitudes of domination that inhibit our relationship to each other and the natural world. This incarnates within her work in human and serpentine forms melding, intertwining, and embracing flora, composing heaps of ambiguous beings within surreal, interdependent ecosystems. Bodies assume and reflect the visual language of plants and dip below watery surfaces to confront shadows, probing our capacity to adapt and regenerate, biologically and psychologically, in the era of the Anthropocene.

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Lauren Pirie is a Toronto-based artist working in a range of media and scale and often in collaboration. Her site-responsive installations have been exhibited in Nuit Blanche, DesignTO, and Lumière and received grant funding as part of ArtworxTO: Toronto’s Year of Public Art. She has exhibited and created public artworks in Canada, the U.S., Central and South America, and Europe. Recent gallery exhibitions include; Conversation at Mayten’s Contemporary in collaboration with Jah Grey, and Sacred Spit at Open Space Gallery (Toronto); Like A Devouring Fire, at Blah Blah Gallery, (Philadelphia); and Vibrant Matter at PADA (Portugal), where she was in residence in 2021. < BACK