Miami artist Lauren Shapiro transforms underwater discoveries into captivating ceramic works inspired by the ocean’s hidden worlds.
WRITTEN BY SEBASTIAN PHILLIPS
Exploration has led to inspiration in Lauren Shapiro’s art for as long as she can remember.
“I grew up in a manufactured neighborhood on the edge of the Everglades, with just a strip of highway separating my home from the national park,” she says. “That artificial barrier fascinated me and pushed me to pursue what was beyond reach.”
Shapiro’s adventurous spirit has served her well. Since receiving her MFA from the University of Miami in 2016, the Miami-based creative–an artist-in-residence at Bakehouse Art Complex has focused on integrating ceramics and technology to uncover and communicate insights from the natural world, often collaborating with scientists to bring her projects to life.
“Adventure is my greatest inspiration,” she says. “My subject matter is in the field, in the ocean. I can’t expand upon it without physically being in it.”
Case in point: To study the marine life often depicted in her art, Shapiro has joined researchers and scientists on various scuba diving expeditions throughout the Florida Keys and French Polynesia. During these underwater excursions, she takes 360-degree scans of corals and other specimens and then stitches those images together through a process called photogrammetry.
“I’ve been collecting these 3D scans over the past five years,” she says. “Thanks to this, I now have a robust archive of corals, leaves, flowers, plants, and seeds to pull from for various projects.”
One such project is a commission by Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Spaces program to create a site-specific frieze that will be installed on the broad central berth of the MSC Cruise Terminal in the Port of Miami. The theme? Corals, a subject that has enthralled Shapiro for years.
“Corals are living archives that hold the history of our oceans in their skeletons, and they’re disappearing,” she says. “There’s a resilience and a simultaneous urgency in their existence that I find fascinating.”
This installation will allow Shapiro to explore that fascination through her ceramic work.
“The ceramic tiles will progress across the frieze in a periodic manner, acknowledging elements of cosmic order or natural systems that I find compelling,” says the artist. “The wooden panels backgrounding the installation are engraved with a pattern complementary to that of the ceramic sculptures. In its entirety, the composition will capture a sense of harmony and global resonance, pulling on the universal connectedness that the ocean offers us.”
Thought-provoking work like this has endeared Shapiro to culture decision-makers across South Florida. Last fall, Vizcaya Museum & Gardens tapped her to showcase her organic works throughout three of the palazzo’s rooms in an exhibition titled Pastiche.
After the Port of Miami frieze is revealed in April, she will be busy with another Art in Public Spaces commission – a sculpture to be installed in South Miami-Dade. In between, she’ll continue her outdoor explorations.
“I have to make time to return to nature regularly,” she says. “I always come back to the studio refreshed and with new ideas.”
