Lauren Godfrey: Entrée, Stage Left

About

Her residency has been focused around creating works that play in the space between theatre and restaurant culture. Influenced by a quote from British writer and food critic AA Gill, Godfrey’s exhibition incorporates objects, text and performance that look to address the slippage between the visual and the verbal.

On the preview evening of 5th June, 6 -9pm Lauren Godfrey will present an installation of shifting objects within Kingsgate Project Space, serving an audience a light and fluid starter, a lyrical and buttery heavy main and a sweet palette cleanser.  Over the length of the exhibition, viewers will be able to request or ‘order’ iterations of the space directly from the gallery invigilators.

The artist’s work frequently returns to autobiography in the experience of the aspirational space of high end restaurants and exclusive art world events.  The records of past experiences are documented via ephemera picked up, and furniture recalled, warped with memories from media or popular culture; Audrey Hepburn dancing on tables in Funny Face, or the sculptural furniture in a little remembered scene from White Christmas.  Godfrey’s is an inquiry into the meeting of materials shared between the worlds of restaurant culture, art and theatre production.

Entitled 'Entrée, stage left’, Godfrey has approached the structure as a three-act play or a three-course meal.  The exhibition is designed to be altered and performed as though a theatrical scene-change, or a table cleared between courses. Treating her sculptures as performers in a scene, Godfrey approaches the process of art making as collaging, much like mixing together of constituent parts in the cooking of a dish.  The elements are united as a series of quotations of existing ingredients, and the processes they are put through as a cooking or curing.