Lauren Fensterstock
With a background in goldsmithing and metal arts, Lauren Fenterstock creates site specific installations referencing nature and decay. Fensterstocks creations are often in the form of monocromatic gardens, grottos, caves, and other natural formations in combination with man-made gardens. She uses a variety of materials, often a combination of stable and unstable materials such as crafted paper, precious stones, food objects, pulverized charcoal, mirrors, and animal parts. Along with creating a paradoxical landscape of permanence and impermanence, Fendertock references 18th century Baroque gardens while utilizing contemporary means such as plexi-glass and rubber coated seashells, melding the past with the present. The combination of permanence and ephemerality touches on a sublime notion of death and decay.
In many of Fensterstock’s earlier works such as Precarious Heirlooms, Fensterstock focused on natural fragile objects. She set precious stones and natural static objects amidst mutable ones such as potatoes, bananas, and soap. She set diamonds in soap, rubies in potatoes, and sapphires in bananas. As time passed, Fensterstock documented the changes as the fragile elements (such as the banana or potatoes) begin to decay in contrast with the stable elements and change the entire landscape. Fensterstock referred to these changes as What Happens. In My First Maine Landscape, the work appears to be a delicate pattern reflecting a landscape but on closer examination it is created from butterfly parts. “It’s about cruelty,” Fensterstock says. “They were rejects, butterflies that were missing parts: a leg, an antenna. They were useless for science. They were going to be thrown away.” (mainemag.com)
The series Third Nature uses the process of curling and shaping fine strips of paper known as quilling and covers the paper in coal dust. Fensterstock combined this with other materials such as Plexiglas and charcoal creating sculptural garden formations along with smoke and mirrors. Third Nature took on several incarnations, some gardens were put into boxes or wall panels, some on the floor, and others evolved into a form of large-scale installations. (mainemag.com)
At the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Fenderstock made a 7-foot-by-14-foot garden with black paper, glue and crushed charcoal. “It feels to me like an outdoor space, and I like the idea of bringing the outdoors inside.” The work is called Incidents of Garden Displacement, and is an homage to artist Robert Smithson and his piece “Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan” which used square foot mirrors to reflect sunlight. In place of mirrors Fenderstock used black Plexiglas panels in her paper garden. (Keyes)
Fensterstock’s view of a garden is that of a complete and enclosed world. This idea of a garden along with the forms found in color-field painting and minimalism are part of her inspiration. Fensterstock research into historic landscape design and theory and how people in the past interacted with the land through various means led to her use of black plexiglass. The use of black throughout her work comes from the 17th-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain, whose name was given to a small darkly tinted mirror so called Claude glass. Fensterstock’s black reflecting panels are akin to those used by artists who utilized black mirrors to abstract a subject from its background by minimalizing the color range and so giving it more painterly qualities. (Keyes)
The use of black throughout Fenderstock’s work evokes more than just a historic means of capturing images. When asked about her interest in darkness, she said “I love the way that things in darkness can sort of appear and reappear. It feels like a magical or liminal space. Perhaps darkness is a space of uncertainty where we can escape the normal logic that rules our lives. I’m definitely interested in escape.” (McDermott)
According to Gilda Williams in her article Defining a Gothic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Visual Art , the idea of the gothic or baroque in contemporary art today is in finding a way to redefine it outside of the cliché of horror and in relation to its longer historical legacy.
“The question today is not, as is often assumed in literary studies, solely one of translating a literary term into visually based media, but of returning “Gothic” to art after a very lengthy sojourn predominantly elaborated within another discipline.” The term gotico began in relation to art by writers in Renaissance Italy as a reference to post-antiquity art and architecture. (413)
After Third Nature, Fenderstock began a shift towards working with cave like formations, materials combined in the shapes of stalagmites and stalactites.
Fensterstock explains the reasons behind this change in Interview Magazine:
“For the last few years, I've been doing a lot of work with paper and looking at the history of garden designs, the ways different styles represent different ideas about man's role in the world. The differences between a Baroque garden and a picturesque garden represent two completely different world views. I kept coming across garden grotto, which are artificial caves, and I became obsessed with them because it's this blend of culture and nature. It's in a natural space, but it's really an augmented natural space. Sometimes they would take, in the 18th century, a cave and reform it, cover the entire surface with shells or another kind of ornament, and create a space that really merged nature and culture…I feel like nature itself is a cultural product and we often have these ideas about the wild or nature and that being separate from humanity. But at this point, I feel like most of our experience with nature—you drive a car to get there, you take a picture of it with your iPhone, you understand it because of books that you’ve read and paintings that you’ve seen—we really can’t separate nature from the culture of man at this point… in my research of caves I was looking at the Werner Herzog movie Cave of Forgotten Dreams. There’s this moment in that movie where he’s in this millions-of-years-old geological formation and he’s looking at 30,000-year-old work of human art, across which there is a 20,000-year-old scratch, and then 10,000 years of crystal creation. He’s filming it as a German visiting France and I’m watching it on Netflix in Maine. That is the intersection that I’m excited about.” (McDermott)
In her article Williams addresses these themes in relation to the contradictory nature of “gothic” and 18th century architecture.
“During the 18th century, fantasy Gothic architecture was secularized in literature to produce suffocating, private spaces divorced from any actual architectural referent. As Gothic literary space grew more tortuous and mysterious, architecture pursuits… began carefully measuring the medieval churches in a series of archaeologically driven studies. Where the past held for architects of the revived style a model for the future, better England, the literary genre was filled with problematic histories requiring resolution by its tortured protagonists, symbolically navigating inhospitable, ancient spaces. The bright neo-gothic architectures that triumphed in civic and ecclesiastical building in England throughout the nineteenth century starkly contrast with the claustrophobic, private architectural visions fabricated in the literature, the latter chiefly contributing to what establishes today’s Gothic image.” (419)
Fenderstock’s work beautifully fuses the dark gothic aesthetic with themes relating to chaos and order, growth and decay, permanence and impermanence.
“I’m interested in bringing these disparate things together and seeing how they can all add light to one issue.” (McDermott)
“Lauren Fenderstock” The Maine Mag October 2009 https://www.themainemag.com/arts/see/1157-lauren-fensterstock-maine/#close
Keyes, Bob. “Black Beauty” Press Harold April 201. https://www.pressherald.com/2011/04/24/black-beauty_2011-04-24/
McDermott, Emily. “Unearthing Gardens” Interview Magazine March 2015 https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/lauren-fensterstock-pulse-contemporary-art-fair#_
Williams, Gilda. “Defining the Gothic Aesthetic in Modern and Contemporary Art’ Gothic World, 412-425 (London: Routledge, 2013)
