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 - Artist Statement

Lauren Ball creates paintings rooted in subconscious processes. Her work begins with automatic drawings—made in Silver Sharpie, colored pencil, or digital tools—that map intuitive compositions before language or representation can intervene. Drawing from Romanticism, Symbolism, and the Cut-up method of William Burroughs, Ball allows meaning to unfold laterally and organically, outside photographic, or conventional narrative logic.

Her process incorporates metaphysical structures and diagrammatic thinking, including “God coincidences”—chance word groupings that guide her spiritual and visual exploration. She draws symbolic resonance from the alchemical properties of silver, associated with feminine and lunar energy, and studies asymmetry, ornament, and marginalia found in medieval illuminated manuscripts.

Recurring motifs—birdhouses, still life tableaus, balconies, lakes, rivers, trees, aqueducts, running women, and figures in interior spaces—surface as fragments of personal mythology. These images appear through what Ball calls soft survivalism: a practice of navigating interior states through subconscious mark-making. Her paintings explore emotional conditions through chromatic layering, allowing depth to appear not through perspective but through the interplay of shifting color relationships.

Ball treats color as a perceptual and spiritual phenomenon. She samples from diverse systems—digital photography, internet visuals, medieval manuscript palettes, optics, and color-aid papers—to explore how color activates sensation and brings form into view. Color, for her, is a condition of light that shapes experience.

Paul Klee, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, Etel Adnan, Milton Avery, Suellen Rocca, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Paul Cézanne influence her work. Ongoing research includes medieval manuscripts, Persian and Indian miniatures, book arts, textiles, astrology, culinary and domestic aesthetics, and disability justice. Ball’s painting practice combines intuitive process, symbolic systems, and formal inquiry to create spaces where feeling and vision meet.

Lauren Ball lives and works in New York, NY.

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@laurenball_studio
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