LAUREN BALL

Shimmer and Glisten, 2025
acrylic dispersion on linen
60” x 40”
152.4 x 101.6 cm

for Cole - friend, poet, and visionary of the magical exchange between soil and spirit, sea and sky, mitochondria and minnows:

Where I come from
my heart is half bark
the other half a quarter cloud
the rest all shark

- John Puhiatau Pule
poet and artist (b. 1962, Niue)

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Lauren Ball lives and works in New York, NY.

Lauren Ball creates paintings rooted in subconscious processes. She begins with automatic drawings—using Silver Sharpie, colored pencil, or digital tools—to map out compositions that emerge intuitively. Drawing inspiration from Romanticism, Symbolism, and the Cut-up method of William Burroughs, her work allows meaning to unfold laterally and organically, outside of photographic or representational logic.

Ball’s process often incorporates metaphysical elements, including diagrams based on “God coincidences”—chance word groupings that guide her spiritual and visual exploration. She draws symbolic inspiration from the alchemical symbol of silver, aligned with feminine and lunar energy, and studies asymmetrical designs and marginalia in medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Motifs such as birds, balconies, running women, and figures within landscape or interior spaces recur in her work. She paints emotional states, allowing color to create layers of meaning. While her scenes may appear flat at first glance, the depth emerges through chromatic interplay.

Ball treats color as a perceptual and spiritual phenomenon. She samples from diverse systems—digital photography, internet visuals, comics, optics, and color aid papers—to explore how color activates perception. For her, color is a condition of light that brings form into view.

Her work is influenced by artists such as Dubuffet, Klee, Frankenthaler, and Rocca. Ongoing research includes medieval manuscripts, Persian and Indian miniatures, book arts, astrology, cooking, and disability justice. Ball’s painting practice combines intuitive process, symbolic systems, and formal inquiry to make spaces where feeling and vision meet.

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@laurenball_studio
#laurenball