Beginning with the problematic of beauty, my work draws on strong feminist traditions that seek to blur the line between traditional patriarchal modes of perfection embedded within contemporary craft practices and ideologies of beauty. In its stead, my work moves toward a more inclusive acknowledgement and re-presentation of the beauty found in imperfections. Building upon such discourses enables an exploration on the problematics of flaws within craft aesthetics as well as the affects and effects of contamination as a challenge to notions of perfection in both the craft world and popular culture as a whole.
Edinburgh-based artist Lauren Puckett is best known for challenging time-honored stained glass traditions that require the use of painted glass for pictorial representation, applying singular transparent pieces of glass to illuminate a new perspective on portraiture. Constituting a uniquely feminist perspective, her work examines subcultures and stereotypes, illuminating the problematic of beauty, and blurring the line between traditional modes of representation and the embedded patriarchal context of the medium, with contemporary power structures and female inequality. By allowing for the gaze to pass through the body, she offers a transparent perspective that transcends surface level.
Puckett is currently working on her MFA in Glass at the University of Edinburgh and is one half of A-negative, a newly developed design team continuing her previous work in architectural glass public sculptures. Straddling the line between narrative and artifact, A-negative, operates within and through the fantastic. Contrary to a world of fantasy, ours is a liminal space – one for pause and reflection – a world that would not be isolated to magic or reality. Through large, highly colorful art “works” ours is a world of the ordinary magnified – a world through the (stained) looking glass – seeking to invoke pause in the viewer, to promote wonder and exploration in the everyday. To find and encounter magic. What is art if not magic? And what is magic if not the extra-ordinary.
Representation
For all exhibition requests, press and sales related enquiries, please contact A Negative Studios at +44 (0)758 585 4077.