Lauren Elder (born 1946) is an American artist, designer, and environmental activist known for environmental works and performative collaborations.
Life and work Lauren Elder was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1946. She has a BA in Fine Arts from UCLA. She also studied Landscape Architecture at UCB Extension. Throughout the mid-1980s to early 1990s she worked with the interdisciplinary performance ensemble, Contraband, as a set designer and performer. Elder lives and works in California, taught at California College of the Arts, and works with environmental art, as well as continuing in set design. Elder is known for being the sole survivor in the crash of a light airplane in the Sierra Nevada in the 1970s.
Theater Works In collaboration with the San Francisco based performance collective, Contraband, Elder produced the performance piece Oracle in 1988. Elder created "an 'industrial,' kinetic visual environment" in which the dancers explored issues of freedom and imprisonment. Singing My Mother to Sleep (1988) is a collaboration with performance artist Nina Wise. This performance explores issues of grief, mortality, and personal catharsis, using the threat of extinction to endangered animals as a metaphor. The performance takes place in a hospital room with large images of animals projected onto the hospital privacy screen. Maria Porges writes of Elder's 1993 production Surrender in Artforum, "Although billed as environmental theater, Lauren Elder's immensely ambitious multidisciplinary performances encompass far more than mere drama. Like her earlier work Off Limits, 1989, Surrender is a sprawling, archetypal story with a narrative thread that twists into knots at times, guiding the audience from event to dream to memory, but always wandering back to the story at hand. This temporal movement is echoed by the frequent physical relocation of both players and audience in and around the hangar-sized space of the theater. Surrender also shifts from spoken text to singing, chanting, and instrumental interludes." Porges continues, "From the first, Surrender drew in the audience, making it clear that the questions being asked were ones that all of us will have to find an answer for, sooner or later, within ourselves. These issues range from war resistance to wartime killing, from the loss and loneliness experienced by the families of soldiers, to the effects of radiation on the flora and fauna of the desert." AND "Even more compelling than the story they told, though, was the visual design of the piece as a whole. Elder's inventions, more sculpture and installation than “props” or “sets,” derived their power from a kind of can-do simplicity, rather than from gee-whiz high-tech effects. (A nighttime sky of stars, for instance, was represented by a huge dome-shaped mobile of bent bicycle wheels, all set in motion by the astronomer's hand.) From one moment to the next, her objects and environments simultaneously spun the fantasy and confronted the audience with difficult truths."
Publications Design as Democracy, Techniques for Collective Creativity, Edited by De La Pena et al., Island Press, 2018 Glance Magazine, CCA, Fall, 2014 Do Not Destroy: Trees, Art and Jewish Thought, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA, 2012. ISBN 978-0615251448 Asphalt to Ecosystems, School Yard Transformation, Sharon Danks, New Village Press, 2010 Urban Homesteading, Kaplan and Blume, Skyhorse Press, 2011. ISBN 9781626368507
Awards & Distinctions NEA Interdisciplinary Arts (1983, 1984, 1988) Eureka Fellowship for Sculpture (1989) Isadora Duncan Award, Best Visual Design (1987, 1990, 2000/01) Potrero Nuevo Environmental Award (2001, 2004, 2005) 2017 Water Rights Residency, Santa Fe Art Institute
1976 plane crash
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