Regional Arts WA Artist of the Month | Lauren Elise Kennedy

There’s something about the light at this time of year in the Mid West. The way it shifts across the land, how it catches the wattle, which is wild after winter’s retreat. Lauren Kennedy knows this light intimately. She watches it from her property north of Jambinu/Geraldton, tracking its changes as she walks between her house and studio, the rain clouds gathering on the horizon, the whole sky opening up above her.

Lauren grew up in the Mid West, spent her childhood on the land, walking dogs through country that would later become the landscape of her paintings. After studying visual arts and textiles at Edith Cowan University, she moved away, tried her hand at a clothing label, and lived in Fremantle. But three years ago, she came back. The country called, as it does.

“I started feeling the joy of slowing down straight away,” she says. “It was grounding to have that space both mentally and physically.”

Now, with the arrival of spring, the wildflowers are doing what they do. They’re spectacular, fleeting, and demanding attention. Lauren’s response to paint them is impulsive; “You get cooped up over winter, then it’s really cathartic to get out in the elements and paint,” she explains. This year, while waiting for canvases that hadn’t arrived, she grabbed whatever she could find to capture the wildflowers in bloom.

Her paintings are landscapes, yes, but they’re also something else; meditations, acts of release. She works with water, lots of it, diluting her paints, looking for ways for the colours to lose control. She rolls out her linen outside, lets the wind blow it, and welcomes the drips. The work has movement, a kind of beautiful chaos that seems at odds with the stillness she finds in the act of making it.

Lauren is humble about her practice, which makes her recent recognition all the more striking. She won the Hangers Prize at the Glover Art Prize in March and took out the overall prize at Heart of the Bush in 2023. “Both were a massive shock,” she says of these wins. “But it’s nice to have recognition of your craft.”

These days, she doesn’t need so many commissions. She’s moved into a steady stream of exhibiting, a rare achievement for any artist, let alone one who only really began her career after her first daughter was born less than a decade ago. The skill was always there, but motherhood gave her the space to claim it.

Last year, she completed a public mural in Jambinu/Geraldton’s Rocks Laneway, painting with mops and working vertically instead of her usual method of painting on the ground. “I had paint in my hair,” she laughs. But there’s pride there too, about giving something back to the community, and marking the place that made her.

Living in regional Western Australia comes with trade-offs. “I have more mental clarity here, but it also can be isolating,” she reflects. In Fremantle, she’d run into artists all the time. Here, the artistic community is smaller, though growing. She teaches at TAFE, runs workshops, and connects with practicing artists in the region.

Rather than the community though, it’s the land itself that feeds her work. The nuances someone passing through might miss. The light changing. The rain coming in. Being immersed in it every day. All her senses are engaged when she paints outside: the uneven ground, the bugs, the heat, the flies.

She’s been to the Pilbara twice for painting field trips, worked at Cheela Plains and Karijini. “It’s so so different and vast,” she says of painting the red country.

Next year, Lauren will embark on an artist residency in the Mid West alongside Jane Tangney (painter and sculptor), Shanti Gelmi (mixed media and installation artist), Rachel Falls Williams (ceramics and textiles), and Sian Bouchard (basket weaving and textiles). The collective work from this residency will be exhibited at Geraldton Regional Gallery in May 2027.

Lauren has two daughters now; Lottie, nine, and Sage, nearly eight. She doesn’t paint every day, but she carves out time for it. Right now, she’s working on a show called “Abundance,” which opens this Friday at the new Piazza Gallery space in Fremantle. The title feels right for this moment, for spring, for the flowers pushing through after winter, for an artist who found her way back to where she started.

Follow Lauren on instagram @lauren_elise_kennedy

Photography captured by Raquel Aranda @raquelarand.a