Lauren Craig
Lauren Craig is a London-based cultural futurist. Her practice as an artist, curator, full-spectrum doula and celebrant is untethered, sprawling and liberatory.
Carefully marrying concept with materiality, she moves slowly between performance, installation, experimental art writing, exhibition making, moving image, research and photography. Her autobiographical, autoethnographic and therapeutic (“autoethnotherapeutic”) approach is a meditation on celebration, commemoration and tribute. Through archival research, reactivation and socialisation, she centres on lived experience while striking through and reframing past and present dominant narratives. She offers her creativity as calls to action for heritage work to include ethical cultural memory and collective intelligence. Her work is an invitation to convene and proposition our futurities.
Craig is a member of the social history and curatorial collective Rita Keegan Archive Project (RKAP). Recent exhibitions include Between There and Here at South London Gallery (2021) and No Loose Strands at the Feminist Library, London (2022). RKAP’s upcoming project is a collaboration with William Morris Gallery and Liberty department store as a response to the Althea McNish’s exhibition, Colour is Mine (2022).
Craig’s current project Rendering Experience proposes a re-appraisal of Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity (1990), edited by Maud Sulter. Grounded in the present, the research questions the text’s visibility, urgency and art-historical impact on curatorial futures. Craig’s previous encounters with Passion include a Maud Sulter study day with Glasgow International and Rhubaba Gallery and Studios, Edinburgh, Oral history Training, Absence/Presence a project about Maud Sulter as part of the Open the Door festival by Glasgow Women’s Library. Lauren encouraged dialogue around the book by exhibiting it in Rita Keegan Archive (Project) at South London Gallery (2020) and Show and Tell, The Women’s Art Library (2015).
Craig is a member of the British Art Network (BAN) steering group and a liaison for the BAN Emerging Curators group. She recently exhibited ‘HerStory, 2002-2021’, an auto-ethnographic photographic collage with the Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2021 at South London Gallery and First Site Gallery. Her forthcoming partnerships, publications and events include collaborations with Feminist Review, Photofusion, The Women’s Art Library, Arts Catalyst and Iniva.
She is a founding member of S: E: P: A: L: S. A group experimenting with her conceptual modality of the same name; which proposes an approach for protective knowledge production and ethical cultural memory. Through live events, a publication and a digital garden the group explore how we can use care and safety in more diverse ways within curating, institutional decision making, commissioning and education. She has founded and directed six creative organisations with a background in ethical, social and environmental entrepreneurship and reproductive justice.
