Laken Jefferson
My work explores the ways people are shaped by the places, roles, and relationships they inhabit. I am especially interested in the negotiation between order and organic growth—between what is constructed, arranged, or performed and what resists containment.
Working primarily through collage and photography, I use found images, printed ephemera, architectural forms, bodily fragments, and material interruptions to build compositions that feel both intimate and slightly unstable. Rooms, furniture, landscapes, thresholds, and the human figure recur throughout the work. I think of these elements not only as subjects, but as psychological containers that can hold memory, expectation, desire, vulnerability, and change.
My process is intuitive and exploratory. I tear, layer, obscure, crop, and remove until the source imagery begins to lose its original meaning and new relationships emerge. I am less interested in creating a fixed narrative than in allowing a work to hold several conditions at once: intimacy and distance, permanence and impermanence, control and surrender.
For many years, my creative practice existed alongside my professional life and was largely personal and self-directed. I am now seeking greater structure, consistency, technical experimentation, and engagement with a creative community. I see the Cedars Union residency as an opportunity to develop a more grounded studio practice, expand collage into more dimensional and material forms, and better understand the visual language connecting my photography and collage.