Lauren Joffe is a ceramic artist who lives and works in Melbourne. She was born in Cape Town and with her family immigrated to Australia when she was young. Her development as an artist can be seen as an outgrowth of her personal biography with South Africa, Australia and Japan. Lauren completed degrees in Law and Arts, majoring in English Literature, before pursuing her interest in art. She studied Fine Art Gold & Silversmithing at RMIT and after graduating began her art practice as a contemporary jeweller and object maker before returning to live in South Africa and starting to work in ceramics.
Lauren’s work has been exhibited throughout Australia and internationally, having her first solo exhibition at Michael Reid Clay Sydney in 2020, at Stockroom Kyneton in 2021 and exhibited in Craft’s Vitrine Gallery in 2023. She has been a finalist in amongst others the Mud Australia Shelley Simpson Ceramics Award, the Omnia Art Prize 2023, the Clunes Ceramic Prize 2022, the Ravenswood Women’s Art Prize 2022, the Alice Prize 2022, the Fishers Ghost Art Award 2021, the Muswellbrook Art Prize 2021 and the Klytie Pate Ceramics Award and Exhibition 2020. She has been awarded Australia Council for the Arts grants and her work has been acquired by private collectors, RMIT University and the Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery.
Lauren’s works are built by hand, using the coiling technique and they are fired in a kiln at a temperature of 1080–1250°C. She is primarily concerned with exploring the form and surfaces of her objects through mark making and texture. She considers the relationship of her pieces in still life compositions and prefers to make simple forms and use a limited colour palette in order to explore form through lines, tone, shadow and pattern. The surfaces of her pieces are all hand painted and the act of mark making is a very slow and meditative process, with fluid marks applied in varying depths to create quiet shifts in the surface from gloss to matte. Lauren has recently begun to change the scale of her work by creating large scale ceramic sculptures constructed out of multiple pieces.
