FRESH MILK is happy to welcome London based multimedia visual artist Lauren Craig to our International Residency Programme between October 13 – November 4, 2014.

During her time on the platform, she will be continuing her series titled ‘Cleanse‘, a site specific, multi-sensory work exploring the intersectionality of sculptural installation, performance and ritual/alternative therapy. As well as taking inspiration from the natural Barbadian environment, Craig will host participatory sessions examining the mental and creative blockages that build up through our busy, overworked lifestyles. Because our bodies do not discriminate against what information they retain in daily life, they act as repositories or ‘palettes/palates’ that accumulate everything, becoming overloaded with unnecessary or negative information. With the artist’s gentle guidance in conjunction with nature, participants will be invited to work through these pile-ups, using art as a catharsis to reflect their ‘cleansed’ state.

Read more about the artist and her practice below, and stay tuned for more information about her residency!

Artist Statement:

Since 2003 I have been working with flowers, and coined the phrase ‘floral installation’ to describe the ephemeral, emotive and sculptural nature of my practice. I created an award winning organisation, Thinking Flowers?, around this idea and used it to challenge global corporations and their approaches to sustainability in the cut flower industry. My work is live, in a sense, and the medium is ever changing; working with living things and the opportunities it brings allows me to explore memory and emotions with a brevity of context and subject. Flowers as a medium have allowed me to bridge gaps and blow away social and economic boundaries and inequalities regarding race, gender, class, disability and health. More recently this work has grown into a more itinerant expression of floral interests, moving into site-specific, immersive happenings and experimental sculptural installations: areas of scent; audience participation; co-creation of content and narrative; playing with ideas of viewers/consumers and producers. My concerns are with the context of flowers in our everyday practice, rituals and ceremonies their origins and their presence in our lives now.

About Lauren Craig:

Lauren Craig is a social entrepreneur and artist researcher based in London. She has designed systems and living business models that have challenged large corporations in areas of racism, minority and women’s rights. Her art and entrepreneurial activity tackle big questions around ethics, equality, sustainability and community engagement in the cut flower industry whilst delivering practical floral alternatives locally, through her organization ‘Thinking Flowers?’

As an entrepreneur, Lauren is involved with social issues such as environmental destruction, London street crime and equality, aiming to promote positive change through ethics, sustainability and engagement. She has developed therapeutic methods using photography to document and tackle street crime and runs a pioneering ethical florist. Additionally, she has founded ‘Field’ – an innovative pop-up community retail space in Brixton Village, pioneered urban green waste schemes and floral donations services whilst campaigning for human, working and women’s rights further afield. She is currently setting up the Field Foundation, which will work to reconnect people with the creative cultural industries.

Her recent work includes ‘Petal Tank’, an experimental film featuring collage of autoethnographic darkroom photography, poetry and sculpture. (Tate Modern Tanks, 2012) ; An artist residency at the Women’s Art Library at Goldsmiths College, University of London (2013-2014) ; Sculptural Garden, collaboration with Paul Jones, Royal Collage of Art for Space Station 65, London (2014) ; ‘Sense and Sensibilities’ at Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2014) ‘Modern Measures – Holding, Pouring, Stirring’ at The Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology in London as part of University College London Museums & Collections (2014). Collaboration with visual arts and research collective ‘X Marks the Spot’, initiated at Studio Voltaire 2011, engages with the archive of photographer Jo Spence to explore concepts of class, race, gender and wellbeing.