Lauren Ewing Explores the Possibilities of the Human Hand
The artist shows two suites of works finger-painted with carbon black soot
THE PROVINCETOWN INDEPENDENT BY SUSAN RAND BROWN JUL 27, 2022
Lauren Ewing is wearing a narrow pin that she designed and fabricated. In lower case, it reads “everything speaks.”
Lauren Ewing in her Provincetown studio. (Photo by Susan Rand Brown)
“My art is all about the world that we live in, and all of the natural world is speaking to anyone who can receive,” she says. Hydrangeas are in full bloom outside her front door.
But the pin’s message also refers to art, she says: “Humans don’t make anything that does not speak.”
Ewing’s studio in Provincetown’s East End is sequestered from the expanse of water and sky that pulls creatives to the Outer Cape. Anchored by a workspace with tiny sculptures, mostly of hands, the studio exudes activity and the pleasure of making.
Ewing is a philosophical artist who relishes what the human hand can do. Humans are makers, she says, naming the handmade objects, from tractor parts to pies, that represented “material culture” on the Midwestern farm where she spent her childhood.
Being a maker is in her blood; she asked for and received her first set of oil paints when she was eight. Her work has been shown at the Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown and in New York City, Germany, Denmark, London, and Australia. It is in the collections at MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Ewing is perhaps best known for the 9-by-9-foot Provincetown AIDS Memorial sculpture, constructed of 17 tons of Tuscan marble, on the east lawn of town hall. “Remembering” is inscribed on two sides. This symbol of the AIDS epidemic and the efforts of caregivers who ministered to the sick and dying was dedicated in 2019. Ewing carved the top surface, with its watery ripples, to represent “a quiet tide under a full moon,” she says.
Ewing is not just a sculptor. A show of her paintings is at the Schoolhouse Gallery through Aug. 10. Gallery director Mike Carroll first heard about Ewing from her sculpture students at the Fine Arts Work Center. “She paints like a sculptor,” he says.
