Gracelee Lawrence USA, b. 1989

Gracelee Lawrence is a sculptor and extended media artist whose work deals with relationships between food, the body, and technology.

Methodologically, Lawrence employs digital technology, such as scanning, 3-D printing, and digital fabrication, in order to construct the images and objects she ultimately creates. Conceptually, her work resolves in a dreamlike space in which feminine forms amalgamate with biomorphic forms or the forms of organic food stuff, such as celery stalks, sticks of asparagus, pineapples, and leaves.

A key concern in Lawrence’s practice is what it means to be an organic, physical body—whether human, vegetable, or animal—in digital space. Her works suggest a realm populated by biocyberorganisms, or an uncanny space between the physical and the digital. The works diligently mimic idealized forms of the real-world subjects on which they are based, while the matte colors that coat the works are specific to the palette of digital rendering software.

“How are fruit and vegetable and plant bodies intimately related to the digital world?” Lawrence asks. “The choices embedded within an object are part of the meaning. My works are often 3-D scans of my body, so I’m remaking myself over and over again. I’m embedded in the labor and the formal qualities of the object. There’s an infusion that could be defined as in relationship with spirit. In the process of making, it almost feels like a divination.”

Lawrence earned her MFA from University of Texas, Austin. Her work has been reviewed extensively, including in The New Yorker, Hyperallergic, Artnet News, ARTnews, and Paper Magazine. She has attended twenty residencies, and is a Visiting Professor of Sculpture at SUNY Albany, NY. In addition to exhibiting extensively throughout the US, Europe and Asia, she has installed large-scale public artworks in Poughkeepsie, NY; the Bronx, NY; Times Square, New York, NY; Shafer, MN; Hancock, VT; and Austin, TX.