Lauren Reiner works in the kitchen and thinks about mortality

Circling Issue #32 featuring Lauren Reiner

Jan 20, 2025

Before we get started: we’re excited to continue our partnership with CreativeMornings and host another iteration of our virtual FieldTrip Sustaining Art in the Home: A Zine Exploration TOMORROW Tuesday, January 21 at 7pm EST. Registration is free and you can join us from anywhere in the world — RSVP at the link below, and feel free to bring a friend or five!

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Lauren Reiner is an artist based in Indianapolis, IN. As an artist, creativity and ritual facilitator, healer, and student of planetary shifts and mysticism, Lauren is guided by a deep passion for expressing the ineffable through imagery. Her mission encompasses guiding others to ignite their creative flames and tap into their latent power. Utilizing watercolor, acrylic, chalks, pencils, pens, and image transfers, she weaves a tapestry of visual storytelling and delves into the realms of Spirit, energy, and the intangible facets that shape our identities. She draw inspiration from the ever-shifting shapes of nature, finding beauty and wisdom in its constant evolution. Through her art, she aims to evoke a sense of wonder and introspection, inviting viewers to embark on their own journey of self-discovery and transformation. It is her belief that by embracing creativity and tapping into the depths of our collective consciousness, we can unlock untold potentials and forge deeper connections with ourselves and the world around us.

It was a gift to be able to visit Lauren’s house for this interview this winter. She lives in an old house that she has been renovating and decorating with care and with joy. Lauren’s way of inhabiting both her home and her art is intuitive and resourceful, introspective and attuned with the life cycles and needs at play both in herself and in the world around her. We talked about grief and embodiment, about her day job and her plants, being a parent and being an artist. Lauren was really generous with her time and space, and I hope you love getting a peek into her home and touchstones as much as I did.

You can find more from Lauren on Instagram and on her website.

Content warning: this interview includes mention of gun violence.

House

My house is my primary touchstone — this whole space is a place for me to create. I’ve lived in this house for a year, and have slowly fixed it up. It’s like a science experiment. I’m like an art scientist, puttering around and trying different things and seeing what works. I’ve had a studio outside my house before, and, while I enjoy the idea of it, and especially the possibility of creating artist relationships and community, it has not actually proven to be the best for me. I know myself and what I need: I need natural light. I need access to my tea and my kitchen. I need a variety of spaces to move around. So this house actually suits all my needs for a studio. The light in here has changed recently because the house next door was bought by a flipping company that painted it a really horrible red, and now all the light coming in my windows is pink, and the greens look a little more grey. It feels a little less peaceful to me, but we’ll adjust.

Pole, Dance

I love pole dance for movement. I love the way that as a woman-identifying person in a world where women are often not given opportunities to express sexuality in a safe way, pole dance makes room for that. I installed the pole myself with the help of a friend, it’s just a big tension rod. It’s easy in theory, but tricky in that it has to be tight enough that it doesn’t come undone with your whole body weight. I have also done pole dance at a studio and done other dance classes in community, which I really like too. I have not been able to dance as much as I want lately, because I’m dealing with some chronic pain and hormone issues. I just turned 44, and I’m navigating some frustrating health situations related to perimenopause — it’s not fun. But I’ll get back into dancing. I still move around and get my body sweaty.

Collage Materials

This is in my extra bedroom that actually could be my full-time studio, but like I said I know myself and I need to be able to move around to different spaces and work on different things in a way that feels loose. I give myself permission to move from project to project, holding it lightly, not fixating or taking any one practice or piece of work too seriously. Lately, I’ve been hanging out in this room when I work on collage. I like to sink into it and turn off my active brain and see how the images pop out at me. Sometimes I listen to the TV in the background, with something I don’t need to focus on but that eases me into flow. I use collage not as my primary work but as a vision board or way of collecting ideas moving toward the bigger work. Lately, I’ve been churning through some ideas around a new series of work that I’m excited about.

Bed, Window, Pin Board

This is my bedroom where I do a lot of work. My bed is my incubator. My recent series of paintings was all made in this room, often sitting on my bed with plastic down. I feel free to hang things on the wall and move them around to look at for inspiration. I spend a lot of time sitting in my bed and looking out the window. It’s really pretty in summer and fall, because all you can see are trees. This is also where I hang my collage images to look at. I inherited this board from my previous job at the Indianapolis Art Center. The got new things and didn’t need these anymore, and someone had cut one in half and it ended up the perfect size for this wall in my room.

Paintings for Grief

This was my recent series of paintings; I sold one of the series. I curate the art in a local coffee shop, and had them hanging there for a while. Making this series was a way for me to work with my grief after the death of my mom in a very violent way in 2021. She was shot by a gun in a home invasion in the house that my son and I were also living in. I have been questioning how to express grief as a visual artist. I tried to do a series that was struggling with these feelings of combined excitement and despair and all the things that come up in grief. I think it was a visually successful and fun-to-make body of work, and I also don’t think it captured what I wanted it to. I wonder if something else is a better medium to get at these experiences, like dance, for example. Either way, lately I think of my visual art as a process of searching for a way to express what it’s like to be a person in this grief.

Teaching Sketchbook

I’m not a sketchbook person, but when I was teaching I started keeping a sketchbook with me as a space for loose play for the moments in classes when students were doing their own work. I would use it to make examples of ways to mix media, or to illustrate something we were talking about in class. I love teaching process. I know I have to give students some foundational skills, but my goal is to get them to the point where they can figure it out. I love finding ways for them to understand and value their own perspective and experience and put it into their work. That is my very favorite thing; it feels like why I am here on the earth.
I stopped teaching at the Art Center when I got my current day job as Project Coordinator for Adolescent Medicine at IU School of Medicine. It’s honestly the perfect job. I’ve had so many different jobs in my life, often many of them at one time. But right now this job suits what I need — it is regular, I feel like I have purpose, I work with great people and use different parts of my brain and skillset, and I actually feel like I have work-life balance in a way that is so hard when you are scrambling and always trying to peddle your wares as an artist. Now my teaching is in the form of workshops, which is good because I can pay myself more.

Kid’s Room

My son Henry is thirteen and lives with me part time. I want him to have a really homey comfortable space that’s all his own. Moving into this house was our first time putting together a room for him. Before this, we shared a room his whole life. We lived in a studio apartment together, we lived with my parents, we lived in a one bedroom with Henry’s dad when we lived together — all in small spaces. It was really special to give him a room, although when he’s not here it does amplify his absence. He’s also an artist, and his room is filled with drawings and things he makes. He made this sign on his door when he was probably seven years old. It’s so interesting to see him develop and style and language in the way he expresses himself, because it’s very different from mine. But he loves to draw in kind of an illustrative, graphic style. He draws characters, he draws battle scenes and makes the sound effects while he’s doing it. He has a really silly sense of humor, and I love to watch him work.

Plants

My house is full of plants, and I spend a lot of time with them. I really think of caring for living things as part of creative practice. The other day I was listening to an audiobook while I was cooking, and they quoted this line from Ann Patchett that says “plant life, like all life, is the subject of constant revision.” I wrote it down because I loved it so much. My life is the subject of constant revision, as are those of my plants. I feel like I can understand myself better through the care of plants and tending to the life cycles of other creatures. I want to be attuned to change, to new growth, to loss. I’m currently trying to save the life of this plant that might be dying. I put a plastic bag over its head to create a humid little greenhouse. I’m not sure it’s going to make it, but I am giving it one last ditch effort.

Tea

I drink tea almost constantly. This is an infusion of nettle tea, which just means a tea that is steeped really long to make it super strong. I like the intensity; I think it’s Sagittarius vibes. I make it in a jar and steep it overnight and then I strain it and put it in the fridge for later. I have a juicer that is like a French press but designed for juice, which didn’t really work very well for juice but is great for straining my tea infusions. I buy my herbs and teas at a bulk health food store, and when the want to measure out a certain amount for me I have to just ask them to give me the whole bag.

Kitchen

I love my kitchen, and I love to cook for people. My son has an anxiety-based eating disorder (ARFID, Avoidant Restricted Food Intake Disorder), which affects the role of food in our house. Earlier in his life I put a lot of effort into making him things, but that doesn’t work for him. Our setup now is that I have two drawers full of his safe foods and snacks and he gets all the agency to choose his food and it’s not my job to police it. But I find a lot of healing in the chances I get to invite other people into my kitchen and cook for them. And I just love hanging out here. It’s bright and cozy, and it’s also where I work with my plants. This spot in my kitchen is usually my plant station, although right now it’s a station for a bunch of herbs I just got that I need to organize. I hang out in my kitchen and think about my mortality.

This interview took place on November 30th, 2024. All images by Krystiana Kosobucki-Howell. You can find more from Lauren on Instagram and on her website.