Lauren Burrow

Lauren Burrow was born Larrakia Country, Garramilla/Darwin, Northern Territory (1992), and lives and works on Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Bunurong/Boon Wurrung Country at Naarm/Melbourne.

Working with substances in transitional states such as shattered glass, beeswax, and wastewater, she elaborates an aesthetics of the centrifuge: a sculptural, philosophical, and ecological proposition for unbounding normative relationships to materials and architectures.

In Foods that don’t rhyme, Lauren Burrow plays with this sense of confusion in her crocodile-canoe sculpture. The crocodile’s death roll prompted a hasty rolling movement in the beeswax casting process, while the animal’s colouring and skin texture are evoked by the mottled sea glass found in the shallows of its habitat. On the adjacent wall, one torch light flashes to the beat of a human heart and another to the beat of a crocodile heart, rhythmically falling in and out of synch. The title of this work of art is inspired by the eco-philosopher Val Plumwood, who, having survived a crocodile attack herself, remarked that ‘it has seemed to me that our worldview denies the most basic feature of animal existence on planet earth – that we are food and through death we nourish others’.