Lauren Boilini was born and raised in Bloomington, Indiana. She received her B.F.A. in Painting and Art History at the Kansas City Art Institute and her M.F.A. at the Maryland Institute College of Art. As a painter she also works in installation and public art, completing exhibitions and projects up and down both coasts. Traveling to and participating in artist residencies has been an important part of her practice. She has served as an artist-in-residence at Can Serrat in Spain, Jentel Arts in Wyoming, Soaring Gardens in Pennsylvania, the Studios of Key West, the Creative Alliance and School 33 Art Center in Baltimore, and as a Consortium Resident at the Studio Art Centers International (SACI) in Florence, Italy. She was invited as an artist-in-residence to the Burren College of Art in Ireland and received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center in 2012. She has completed public art projects for the Maryland Department of Public Health and the Greenville-Spartanburg Airport. In 2016 she was awarded a GAP grant to publish a book of drawings and spent the summer of 2019 as an artist-in-residence at MASS MoCA working on the sequel, which she completed for a solo exhibition at Furman University in South Carolina in 2020. In the winter of 2022, she opened a solo exhibition at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma and began work on the third in a trilogy of artist books while artist-in-residence at Amazon’s headquarters in spring 2023. The following fall she worked with the Open AIR program in Montana as the first artist-in-residence at the Missoula Butterfly Museum and a fellowship from the McMillen Foundation helped to fund a residency on Vashon Island this past summer.

In addition, she currently teaches studio art and art history at The Evergreen State College. Collaborations with a number of different artists in her close-knit community have been vital to the development of her work and she looks forward to future opportunities to expand that practice. Lauren is also a marathon open water swimmer and with her immediate family close by, she loves to call Seattle home.

In my current body of work, I look at the idea of excess, when images of excess become meaningless and fall into the realm of pattern. This idea of gluttony is reflected in our current culture. We are a hedonistic society, always looking for more until the more we are looking for loses its meaning.

My studio practice has consistently been painting, often extending into the realm of installation. Research, reading and exploration are vital to my process, consistently driving my work forward. I continuously seek and study epic narratives, creating my own for each work. I am fascinated with crowds of beings converging in one space at one time. This includes religious practices, festivals, political gatherings, orgies, feeding frenzies, stampedes, riots, migrations, etc. The pattern and beauty that emerges from these chaotic scenes pulls me into the studio to recreate that same energy.

Recently I have been drawn to images of battles and duels; I am interested in what drives us to violence and destruction of life. My dismay paired with the attraction I feel for the conflict that I see around me leads me towards research into how violence in the animal kingdom mirrors our own, and particularly where it overlaps with human behavior. Violence is most often a problem of gender, and I work to understand why. This drives me to look at what is nature and what is nurture, always searching for answers, and puzzling through the beauty I find at that intersection.

Developing this work and other curiosities have led me to collaborate with other artists in my community. Working alongside another artist has been a vital part of my practice and I look forward to future opportunities. Site-specific projects in particular have been the perfect place to problem solve and expand my work. The balance I look for alone in the studio I have also found through public art, installation and artist residencies.

Though I traditionally work on a large-scale, when I first moved to Seattle from Baltimore in 2014, I had to scale down. In 2016 I was awarded a grant to create a small book of drawings loosely based around the structure of a graphic novel, to which I recently finished the sequel. I built the book sequentially, telling the story behind paintings I have been working on for the past ten years. It consists of small drawings pulled from the animal kingdom that investigate my thoughts on sport and war, and their shared violence.

Image-based, the story takes place on a fictional island in which only male members of different species have survived and explores the destruction that follows. In this second book, the human men have died off, and their animal counterparts have been left to take over the island and fight for power. I have begun work on the third in the series. The final part of this trilogy looks at how moths, butterflies and insects would interact in this dystopian vision of an alternate world, completing a cycle that will allow me to start again from the beginning.

SeaTac Airport, Port of Seattle, WA
PNC Bank, Baltimore, MD
Tracy Pozil, Seattle, WA
Jennifer Parker & Steve Clagett, Seattle, WA
Glynnis & John Cowdery, Bainbridge Island, WA Amazon Headquarters, Seattle, WA