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• 1 media/voilenceofgrace1.jpeg 2026-05-08T18:57:15+00:00 Lauren Schelling 7 Petals & Teeth plain 2026-05-08T19:37:34+00:00

  My work looks at transformation through Greek mythology, focusing on how these stories shape ideas of beauty, power, and control. I work with figures like Persephone, Medusa, Leda, and Europa, characters whose narratives are often presented as romantic but are rooted in force, change, and loss of agency. I’ve always been interested in how these stories have been repeated over time and how they continue to influence how women’s beauty is seen and understood.
  
  

  I work across painting, sculpture, and installation. The paintings are made on mirrors, which changes how the viewer engages with them. You don’t just look at the image. You see yourself in it. That reflection brings the viewer into the same space as the subject, making the act of looking feel more immediate. It also ties into ideas of self-perception and how identity is shaped through images. The viewer becomes part of the same systems of gaze, desire, and objectification that the work is questioning. It collapses the distance between subject and viewer, past and present, and myth and lived experience. This builds on my junior thesis, in which I reimagined mythological couples through appropriated romantic paintings. At that stage, I focused more on the relationships themselves and how they were idealized. Now, I’ve shifted toward what is happening within those scenes. Instead of recreating full compositions, I isolate specific moments, gestures, or symbols. The work feels more direct this way and less resolved. 
  
  

  I appropriate imagery from Leonardo da Vinci, George Henry Hall, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, and historical contemporary references, drawing on compositions originally constructed through a male gaze. I rework them into my own visual language using mostly greyscale with cadmium red accents. The red points to moments of violence, but also to survival and transformation. The sculptural elements extend the work into space. I use materials like a bull skull, a snake form, and a Greek vase that reference the myths without directly illustrating them. A pomegranate can point to Persephone without showing her figure. The video installation brings in contemporary imagery by compiling beauty advertisements from different time periods. By layering and looping these clips, the work highlights how ideals of femininity are constructed, repeated, and normalized. It connects these modern standards back to mythological narratives, showing how objectification and control continue in more subtle, commercial forms. 
  
  

  There is an ongoing tension between control and vulnerability throughout my work. The body is both seen and acted upon, objectified but also self-aware where beauty and violence exist at the same time. That instability and how something can feel seductive and uncomfortable, familiar and unsettling kept making me return back to the question of how these narratives are constructed, who they serve, and what happens when they are broken apart. By revisiting mythological imagery in this way, I am not trying to retell the stories completely, but to shift how they are experienced. I focus on fragments and on moments that hold weight, allowing space for new interpretations to exist alongside the original ones.