Lauren Tompkins

Lauren Tompkins is an Austin-based sculptor working primarily in clay. Born in Albuquerque and raised in San Antonio, she draws from the architecture and desert landscapes of New Mexico as well as the flora and fauna of South Texas. Working through handbuilding, casting, and painting, Tompkins creates ceramic sculptures that move between figures, natural forms, and abstracted structures to explore memory, ritual, protection, and the emotional weight of objects. She currently teaches ceramics through the Continuing Education program at ACC, where she introduces students to handbuilding techniques and the expressive possibilities of clay.

My recent work uses sculpture as a way of translating my internal world through the language of the natural one. I am drawn to objects that already feel charged: stones, branches, fruit, insects, fawns, vessels, devotional figures. These things arrive with their own symbolic histories, but also with a quieter, more personal power. I approach them as omens, offerings, relics, or companions— objects that seem capable of holding grief, protection, tenderness, and unease all at once. 

Narrative storytelling, superstition, and ritual are central to my practice. I am interested in the way symbols allow us to speak about emotions that are otherwise difficult to name. 

Through porcelain, wax, and various other surface treatments, I make objects that feel suspended between the familiar and the spectral. I am interested in the tension between care and disturbance: the sweetness of a fruit beside the suggestion of decay, the innocence of an animal beside the knowledge of harm, the sacredness of a figure beside the instability of the body. The act of making becomes a form of attention, even reverence. To sculpt these forms is to spend time with them, to preserve them imperfectly, just as memory is preserved imperfectly, and to acknowledge the emotional weight they carry. 

Much of my work occupies a space between safety and terror. Nature is a provider, but it is also indifferent, ravenous, and cyclical. The home, the body, and the psyche can feel similarly divided — places of comfort and vulnerability, devotion and loss. I return to ritual objects, effigies, proverbs, and superstition because they reveal how long humans have tried to soften their anxiety through meaning-making. My sculptures continue that impulse. They are attempts to build small sites of protection, mourning, and tenderness; objects that hold the contradiction of wanting to be safe in a world that is constantly changing.