ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
Lauren Thompson (b.1998) is a UK-based photographic artist currently studying on the MA Contemporary Photography; Practices and Philosophies course at Central Saint Martins. Her self-portraiture explores the emotional residue of a moment, drawing out layered, latent versions of the self. Working in-camera, she uses long exposure techniques as a form of corporeal mark-making: motion becomes medium, the body a palette, and the camera an active collaborator.
Her practice is rooted in expressionism and informed by posthumanist thinking, where identity is understood as contingent and in flux. Faces fragment and distort, often expressing multiple emotional states at once; bodies dissolve and reform, not through digital manipulation, but through exposure and embodied movement. Using her own body as material, she explores broader questions of identity by positioning the self not as a fixed subject but as a site through which complex states arise.
She refers to these spectral impressions as photoplasms, a term she coined to describe the amorphous forms that emerge from long exposures. These exist between the visible and the intangible—not quite self or other—but thresholds between presence and absence, flesh and feeling. Through this process, a somatic, visual language for the invisible is constructed—evoking shifting inner states that resist stable representation.