28 may - 21 june 2025

front gallery

Lauren Downton
Mutable Realities

Statement 

Mutable Realities employs grafting as a method to explore themes of hybridity, entanglement, ecology and material culture. Forming an intertwining meshwork, Mutable Realities evokes shifting states of growth, mutation and dissolution. Ceramic casts of organs, branches, antlers, rubbish and found plastics accumulate and intermingle into hybrid states.

Downton combines the ghostly qualities of porcelain with post-consumer materials—such as found rubbish and second-hand artificial flowers—as well as natural materials including whiskers, fleece and glaze, creating slippages between what is biological and artificial, natural and synthetic. Exploring notions of the ‘cast off’ and excess, these hybrid fusions examine the complex entanglements between consumption in contemporary society, and the natural environment.

By interweaving animate and inanimate matter, Downton dismantles material hierarchies and makes way for imagined futures with regenerative thought. Shifting between thresholds of death and life, object and ghost, Mutable Realities explores conditions of permanence, transmutation and renewal across human and non-human worlds.

Downton explores hybridity as a means of re-imagining what it means to be human and redefining how we interrelate with nature—how we perceive its boundaries, and understand its enmeshments with society.

Artist Bio

Lauren Downton is an emerging artist working in contemporary ceramics and installation, based on Kaurna land, South Australia. She combines animal, botanical, and human-made forms into ghostly hybrid assemblages that examine humanity’s relationship with the natural world.

Downton was selected to exhibit in the 2022 Hatched: National Graduate Exhibition at the Perth Institute of Contemporary Art. She has gained multiple awards from the University of South Australia including The Australian Ceramics Association Award (2023), Harry P Gill Memorial Medal Award for outstanding work in ceramics (2021) and Vacation Research Scholarship (2022). In 2024, she was presented with the Fetzer Award for Excellence and City Rural Insurance Development Award at the Helpmann Academy Graduate Exhibition.