Artist Statement

Lauren E. Peters on Identity, Costumes, and Creative Growth 

July 2025

Your work examines identity and gender through a lens that feels deeply personal yet universally resonant. What initially drew you to this form of self-portraiture, and how has it evolved?

There is so much that goes into the portraits, and I think it’s for that reason that I’ve been able to sustain this project for almost 10 years now. In 2016 I had the opportunity to exhibit in a gallery and had nothing to show, let alone a cohesive body of work. It had been years since I had done any fine art, and seeing a painting by Chantal Joffe in a magazine pushed me toward self-portraiture. I always hated having my picture taken and had this sobering moment of thinking about how I would regret not having many photos of myself in my twenties or even in college.

Mind you, this was also the heyday of the selfie and crafting virtual identities. I had very little desire to join this movement and thought I could make paintings instead—but also get at something about the images being projected as an illusion or false reality.

But wait, there’s more: I also cannot take a personality test to save my life. Working in self-portraiture helped me deal with this conflict between opposing forces of identity that made me feel like I couldn’t pick a side, have a definitive answer, or check a box. Two big ones were masculine vs. feminine and introvert vs. extrovert, which still heavily come into play but have certainly changed over time.

This project has made me more sure of myself in terms of confidence and self-worth, but I can’t say that I’m any better at answering direct questions about my personality or identity. I am just more at home within the uncertainty and nuance, and working from the viewpoint that it’s all a performance. RuPaul’s quote still sums it up perfectly: “We’re all born naked and the rest is just drag.”

Identity seems so nebulous to me, but I fully respect those who have the self-knowledge and trust to define themselves in their own chosen words. Words have just rarely worked for me, so I’ve created my own visual language within which I can express myself in a way that feels true and whole. This project started as a way for me to connect with myself—as I thought this would be my own semi-private exercise—and has evolved into a way for me to connect with others as I put these bolder versions of myself out into the world. The more personal the paintings become, the more universal they feel, as we all respond on a deeper level to someone speaking their truth—that spark of witnessing someone connected to their authentic self.

You speak of costumes as both armor and projection. How do you decide what persona to step into for a given painting?

A bit of backstory will be helpful here, as my practice started years and years before what you can see now. Clothing and textiles are my inherited mother tongue; painting is my chosen language. The family business started by my grandfather was a high-end dry cleaners in the land of the du Pont estates, generating childhood fantasies of the lives that inhabited those wardrobes with an enviable dress-up collection at home.

Before I started painting again, I found myself costuming for a theater as a creative outlet while working (again) in the family business. The language and power of clothing, along with decades of dabbling in theater, was deeply ingrained before I started working in self-portraiture.

Bringing together this background with the modern insecurity of a dueling virtual plane of existence, I feel an increasing pressure to find something real. Using wigs that are used for cosplay or referencing myths featuring heightened experiences are ways to communicate this world that lives just outside our reality. It’s a strange place to be—trying to find something real by way of make-believe and ongoing contradictions that make me feel like it’s useless to try and put this into words. Everything is concurrently real and fake, so why not speak in myths and colors?

It’s impossible to sum up everything that goes into each piece, but I’ll use my most recent painting as an example of what happens along the way. In an ongoing attempt to retell stories of those who have been pigeonholed or relegated to the sidelines, inspired by writers like Natalie Haynes and Rebecca Solnit, I wanted to make a painting about Athena. Athena is not my favorite, but as a woman representing wisdom and war, I felt called to give her a moment of play with some owl puppets from IKEA.

It wasn’t until I was pretty far along in the process (actively painting) that I read that these were not some random symbol associated with wisdom but represented another woman who suffered one of the numerous assaults in Greek mythology and was transformed into an owl. To say that I was devastated is not much of an exaggeration. I wanted to see this woman (Athena) as more than her actions—to set aside judgment and recognize that this person deserved joy and rest. That I created this moment at the expense of another woman, a woman exiled into this form and pictured as a mere plaything, was heartbreaking.

With influences ranging from Greek mythology to vintage textiles, how do you integrate such diverse references into a cohesive visual language?

Breaking it down to its smallest parts, I think the heaviest lifting here is done by my color palette, followed by patterned clothing—but it’s also the same person every time. I’ve always worked well in a system where I’m able to explore how many possibilities exist within a limited number of variables. Utilizing these building blocks of color and pattern with a human figure somewhere in the composition, I have yet to feel confined by this structure as I’m also changing as it moves through my experience.

Beneath all the razzle-dazzle is a very simple formula to hold everything together, and it stays fresh with time as a collaborator.

My process doesn’t seem any different to me than picking out a shirt to wear, out of all the types of shirts in the world, and wanting to listen to a specific song out of all the music and all the genres across time—plus choosing what to eat for lunch while wearing the shirt and listening to the song. Each day is a melting pot of diverse references and roles to play, and we somehow make choices to face the onslaught of information and shifting landscape.

We are surrounded, if not exquisitely and horrifically overwhelmed, by a vast amount of visual data that we’re asked to interpret and then hold in our bodies. Whether I’m referencing a character or story or feeling, I’m trying to get at something about processing the current moment and our shared history. It’s wild, chaotic, and glorious. If we have the gift of sight, our lives—and my paintings—are about integrating this mess into something beautiful.

What does it mean for you to be both an artist and an arts professional—and how do you maintain balance across these roles?

I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this question! Part of me is just so proud to have these jobs, as I had no clue what to do with an art degree after college and ended up in coffee shops and retail. It is also still an unmistakable feeling in my body of what life was like before I started painting again—how painful it was to feel like an outsider to what I cared about the most.

It is very important to me to help emerging artists empower themselves, encourage everyone else along the way as much as possible, and help in any way I can to build community. Finding enough time to get actual painting or creative work done is the most difficult part, so finding the balance is a challenge every single day.

For almost three years I was able to paint full-time, but I always acknowledged that that could change. I try to enjoy whatever stage I’m in, and am thankfully at a point in my life where even something I refer to as my “office job” still allows me to help other artists and learn about the field.

Are there days that I am sobbing in my studio because it feels like too much? For sure. But even if I could afford to be in my studio 100% of the time, I would still be taking on odd jobs to help the arts community at large. It is tough to watch time go by so quickly and not be getting done everything I want to accomplish, but I have no desire to walk this road alone or leave anyone behind that I have the power to bring with me.

What conversations do you hope your work sparks in today’s cultural and social climate?

It had seemed to be the case that my practice was “lower case p” political, as a woman’s body or feminine body has always been political, and art itself is political. However, in this very current climate I may have graduated into the next category.

Knowing that my work could now provoke a response at a national level for speaking about gender as a construct or gender nonconformity is not something I ever imagined taking place, while I still knew those were conversations that needed to be happening. As I particularly care about expressing a bold and multifaceted view of femininity or The Feminine, I want that to go hand in hand with empathy and seeing beyond surface-level beliefs, appearances, or identity tied to social media.

It’s dangerous to fall into a worldview where everything is black and white, dumbed down, and I hope that my work opens a dialogue into how complex and colorful things are when you’re open to allowing something to exist as it is and believes itself to be.

Like everyone else, I am trying to teach myself the lesson to not want something to exist as I see it or what I project onto it.

I identify with the color pink because it has historically been ripe for interpretation. The color pink exists, full stop—but first it’s a color for boys because of its strength, a color for girls to make people think they need to buy duplicate items for children, forced into a triangle as a mark of sexuality, an overall victim to strong opinions.

My use of vibrant color in general is intentional and political. In Chromophobia by David Batchelor, he writes:

“Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to devalue color, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity… colour is made out to be the property of some foreign body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or pathological.”

There are so many conversations to be had about seeing the value and fullness in those unlike ourselves, in trying to recognize each other’s humanity. I am terrible at this when it comes to those who are trying to take away the rights and humanity of others, but I know I need to work against being siloed into an echo chamber of my own.

I am creating work to exist in a world where it’s unnecessary to fall into a particular category and all of identity can be fluid. This is just my story to tell, my imagination at play—which is not to say that I want to impose this loosey-goosey ideology on anyone else. But it is my hope that as long as I’m opening a door to this perspective, it allows other doors and windows and cupboards and umbrellas to open.

STORIES & INSIGHTS: Meet Lauren E. Peters

October 2024

Lauren, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. If you could go back in time do you wish you had started your creative career sooner or later?

I quit my full-time job a few months after turning 40 to pursue a career as an artist. Being a woman in your 40s is a wild ride on its own, let alone one that throws a great job working in a commercial gallery into the wind and abandons the plan of settling into a stable career. After being an art major in college but then entering a period of not painting for about 10 years, I was finally able to pick it up again and show a small body of work in 2016. There is a significant amount of pressure I have created for myself in thinking I have to make up for lost time but given the highly introspective nature of my work, I don’t think I could have started any earlier. Examining the complexity of identity has required a surprising erasure of self, one that I feel I was so frantically trying to build through my 30s. I often joke that my practice is built upon my inability to take a personality test with any amount of conviction, a desperation to check boxes that would tell me who I was. And now I want to live in all of the spaces around and in-between those boxes, as unsettling as it may be at times. Feeling like an outsider is a common theme among artists, and one that is compounded for me as our culture seems to have very little knowledge of what to do with middle-aged women, especially one without her own children or a recognizable career. I think that designation of “other” is what lets me explore my subject matter with such freedom. There were other issues in play as well, mainly a freak accident that put me in a lot of medical debt at a time when I did not have health insurance. Trying to physically and mentally heal from that experience is not one that lends itself to a creative spirit, or one that elicits bold action. It took a global pandemic to push me into unknown territory, having never once leapt in hopes a net would appear. All of the hardship in those “lost years” were as necessary as getting to know myself better, and the accumulation of life experience feels crucial to playing the long game in a field that is not for the faint of heart.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

Working for a number of years in self-portraiture is something that makes complete sense in hindsight, but a world I entered with no intentions of it lasting beyond that first exhibit. All I wanted to do was paint, and after college I could not find an idea that I could dig into and eventually stopped painting altogether. Having grown up within a family business that was a specialized, high-end dry cleaner, I also found myself working there again after college. During this time I began filling hours with costuming at a local theater and began to absorb even more knowledge of how our clothing communicates our sense of identity to the world. You can also safely inject a love of playing dress-up, fashion, and a previous background in theater into this story. So when I desperately needed an idea for a cohesive body of work (as I had started renting a studio in order to paint, but only the pressure of the show offered in conjunction with the rental really got me to focus), I put my own quirky wardrobe to use and costumed myself. Words have always fallen flat as a means to express myself, so finding a visual language with an alphabet of costumes and props and wigs provided a way to try and find my voice. Each painting is based on a photo I take with my cell phone; a selfie that seeks to embody a different persona or to channel a character that represents a chaotic third other, a misunderstood or complicated role to reflect the intricacies of life as a human. Many of my portraits are also seeking a more inclusive language surrounding the feminine, separated from the concept or socialization of gender, a way to define beauty that is bold and resilient and brave.

Another surprise, in addition to how much I enjoyed this work and continue to find inspiration within these parameters, is the positive response of an outside audience to the portraits. And want pictures of my face in their homes! As I created these larger-than-life guardians for myself, I have found that other people want that feeling or presence for themselves as well. This started as such a deeply personal examination of self, and I am so grateful to have had the time to develop this project in private while simultaneously finding the delight in its life outside my studio walls. It brings me a tremendous amount of fulfillment and joy that these paintings could evoke even a tiny amount of shared feelings and experiences within others.

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

The desire from the beginning has been to inspire others to see themselves in new light, and escape from whatever box or binary that holds them captive. I want to find a way to help people embody their own complexity and nuance. It took awhile to reach this point of feeling confident about my own paintings, and now I am excited to devote more time and energy to this foundational belief and expand beyond the limitations of my own style/medium and face/body. One extremely meaningful project I did in 2021 was to curate a show with 16 other artists creating their own version of one of my early self-portraits, from photography to couture clothing to performance, etc. I am also trying to see this work through an anti-capitalist lens, because as soon as we allow ourselves to be defined by these boxes, someone is going to tell us we need to buy something in order to stay there. Really any of the -isms that are dividing people have a tee shirt that someone wants to sell you, let alone the way we judge people or separate ourselves by our appearances. As I think about my artistic practice as one that has my regular ol’ human body as my base material, and then I add a story to that form by way of material objects which carry some sort of meaning or significance, it is all a projected narrative, a fantasy. (And to a lesser degree, that’s what we all get up and do every morning, and then sometimes a second time if we have separate plans for the evening and need to project a different component of our identity.) This has been my mission from the start, to work in community with others as this was not a path to individualism (and I’m afraid it might appear that way) but one toward new possibilities and collaboration. I am trying to create a space to question what we can only see on the surface, to exist beyond the simple categories that were made by our culture or family or society. We’re all just regular ol’ human bodies moving about the world, looking for some semblance of truth and connection, and we’re bigger than the stories we’re told we are allowed to express.



We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?

It is tricky to be an introvert and love flamboyant colors and clothing. The number of people who have seen my work before meeting me will also tell me that they expect me to have brightly colored hair and/or a more outgoing personality. Having an artistic practice about yourself is generally such a bizarre place to live, and putting it in terms of how I have clothed myself over the years also feels like a very unique framework to consider. I wish I could tell you that I’ve officially learned or unlearned this lesson, but I think my entire life will be spent trying to match my outsides to my insides. Even still, I never would have thought it possible to be comfortable wearing some of the clothing I now own until the paintings showed me I could. The inability to separate outgoing and sociable personality expectations of someone who is wearing a hot pink suit is a belief I did not realize I had internalized until I began this work. Allowing myself to still be anxious or shy around people while wearing an outfit that looks like it was made from outdated curtains or grandma’s couch is space I can now navigate. There have been plenty of straightforward lessons along the way, both as an artist and a small business owner, but this is by far the most profound. I had no idea going into this that it would completely change my life and sense of self.