Lauren Thompson (b. 1998) is a London-based photographic artist working across still and moving image and installation. She is currently completing an MA in Contemporary Photography: Practices and Philosophies at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Her work has been exhibited in London, New York, and across the UK, including at the International Center of Photography, New York, Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, and Central Saint Martins.
Artist Statement
Photography is often defined by the frozen moment. My work moves against this, using duration to free the subject from a single instant and allow it to exist across time. Working with long exposures, I use movement as a form of corporeal mark-making. Multiple gestures, positions, and impulses accumulate within a single image, allowing the body to fragment, overlap, and reform. The images are created entirely in-camera, where form becomes stretched and reshaped through embodied duration rather than fixed representation. Although the work begins with my own body, it is less concerned with self-portraiture than with the body as a site through which memories, relationships, atmospheres, and emotional experiences pass. These accumulated presences emerge within the image as what I describe as photoplasms: traces that merge what is seen with what is felt through time. Much of the work takes place within domestic interiors. As a house is shaped by those who inhabit it, I understand the body in similar terms: as a structure that absorbs the impressions of those who have moved through it. The home and body begin to mirror one another, functioning as both witness and vessel. Walls, corners, thresholds, and empty rooms become extensions of psychological space, while the figure moves through them as something continually dispersing and reforming. Within a research-led framework I describe as The Invisible Hotel, the body becomes a temporary site occupied by memories, past selves, emotions, and external influences. Identity is approached not as singular or fixed, but as layered, contradictory, and in constant transformation. Across photography, moving image, and installation, I use duration to make visible what normally remains unseen: the accumulation of experiences, presences, and emotional residues that exist beyond the limits of the frozen instant.