NEWS

The Women's Art Collection at Cambridge University have just made a short film about my practice. See in the Press section.

Hello from Earthworm, The Lady Doctors and Clown Choir!
After an intense period of clown/ fool training, my practice now encompasses absurdist performance and curated comedy cabaret style events that celebrate the sacred state of idiocy within community.

Stryxshop are now stocking my prints and MEATOO jewellery- https://www.stryxshop.co.uk/shop/lexi-strauss-/31

Thank you Arts Council England and the Elmley Foundation for awarded funding to research the relationship between trauma and humour

'Tupperware Party' and 'Hostess' now on permanent display at the New Hall Art Collection, Cambridge University.

STATEMENT
I explore the complexity of our interactions with belief systems and processes of individuation, combining paintings, performance and other media with Specious, fluid, personal fictions derived both from interviews and imagination. I subliminally weave works together in order to explore the idea of individuation and complex human relationships with belief systems. My work tracks the escapism and paradoxical self-segregation that come from a distorted desire to belong, and seeks answers to heal it.

Narratives seeking out absurdity and subversion may hold insightful keys, since truths are often grasped in their transition from nonsense. Thus, subjects within the paintings sometimes appear humanely clown-like, often displaying both a rigid facade and a vulnerable persona.

Paintings are also occasionally ventriliquised in order to tell stories. Playfully theatrical installations using projections allow objects or subjects within the imagery to breath, speak and sing collectively or as individuals.

Clown/ trickster performance enables deeper development of narrative elements, whilst simultaneously promoting our innately playful natures over the (often rarified) ‘Arts’.

I feel honoured to work directly with the profundity of laughter, experiencing the postman role of Freud’s ‘Die Witzige Einkleidung’- the joke as envelope that conceals psychic messages. This seems activist, expanding opportunities for potant metamorphosis of diverse spaces, with audiences beyond art-world contexts.