Lauren Chipeur

collaborations with April Martin and Zoë Wonfor

The apparent position of an hour

The hands of a clock using touch as an indication. It explains what time is without ever really changing. Repeating and restating maybe. It is two o’clock again but when is that? A theoretical device — theoretically this is the way time moves. Forward not backward. It does have something to do with forwardness insofar as this text is preliminary like a foreword. If time is a surface I can begin to understand why people talk about “the marks of time”. Unlike the hands on a clock, a shadow is not only a form of indication. Perhaps it is a consequence of light. A protective layer that reveals light’s magnitude. Water moving describes time not as a surface but as an erosion. Or, a dissipation that encourages spreading. Containment is only one of the ways it articulates itself. One of the ways it allows us to touch it.

The numbers on a clock forecast a pattern. We found the patterns in the ceiling, marking arrangements ahead of us, resembling the holes on the foam boards we found behind the shopping centre. We find out the orange berries we keep seeing are called Pyracantha, known colloquially as orange glow or scarlet firethorn. What did you google again? ‘Small orange berries / bush / switzerland / thorns” ? They have incredible thorns, a warning maybe, since they aren’t good to eat raw. Like apples their seeds are full of arsenic, but probably not enough to kill you. We pass our time stringing these tiny berries onto threads. They used to feel so rare and special, but now we can see them everywhere. In the same way that one comes to know most things, we learned them once and then we saw them everywhere. Could it be that if something becomes so apparent, you stop seeing it all together? Knowing it too well?

August 2017

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November 2016

September 2016

A kind of clearing

A series of limestone sculptures made in response to the history of Humboldt Park and the site of the work, Jensen Formal Garden. Much of the State of Illinois is drawn over a bedrock of limestone which made the mineral a significant feature in the work of Jens Jensen.

In the case of Illinois and specifically Chicago, limestone is a ubiquitous material used in architecture largely because of its local availability and durability. Limestone functions as the distillation over time of a world unto itself, living, dying, stacking, decomposing, forming and solidifying into bedrock.

A piece of copper pipe has been installed in each large piece of limestone to mirror the vases previously located on the pedestals in this quadrant of the Jensen Formal Garden. Parkgoers are invited to install their own arrangements of local flora in the vessels.

May 2017

staring at the sun with your eyes closed

Newsprint, raw shea butter, glass construction bricks, unfired clay, double backed insulation foil, prairie grass, fluorescent lights, iridescent gift wrap, static plastic sheeting, packing tape, porcelain, latex tubing, desk lamp.

Dimensions variable. Images by Edwin Isford

September 2016

Pleasure at a close distance

a project with April Martin, Lara Schoorl, Lauren Chipeur and Zoë Wonfor, located in an empty storefront at 2351 N Milwaukee Avenue, Chicago, IL. The four artists, some of whom had never met, were for the first time in the same place. The project functioned as both a beginning and a meeting point. Over the course of a week the contents of the window were rearranged, added to and subtracted from. While authorship and leadership evaporated we began to expand together as an exercise in thinking beyond the subject, bleeding into ourselves and each other. Ultimately we found a way to cut the materials to fit the space and cut ourselves to fit into the space between each other, all while navigating Chicago in a silver honda fit.

Alongside this, our time spent together was marked by moments of 'non-work': driving; reading; cooking; eating; talking - moments that became incredibly important to this project as it took us outside of ourselves. The undefined shape of what we wanted this project to be, was ultimately guided by these slow in-between moments.

May 2016