Lauren Jones

Location | Studio Gallery, 7D Wandoo Street, Fortitude Valley

Exhibition | August 22nd - August 29th

Opening Night | 6pm-8pm August 22nd

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In Rouge, oil painting is employed not as a vehicle for nostalgia but as a site for immediacy and re-centring. Working in an alla prima approach (wet-into-wet, direct, and responsive), the artist resists polish in favour of presence. Marks are left visible, gestures unrevised, allowing the materiality of paint to echo the embodied themes at play.

The recurring tulip becomes a charged motif: held in hand, cast in shadow, isolated against cloth or colour field. It functions as a structural thread through both still life and portraiture, drawing attention to what is often overlooked. In this context, the flower is neither passive nor ornamental. The tulip, in all its swoon and sway, becomes a symbol of self-possession, sensuality, and quiet strength.

Throughout the work, there is a deliberate tension between constructed composition and intuitive application. Painterly immediacy meets formal deliberation. Colour is used not descriptively but assertively—red, especially, recurs with intention, signalling presence, intensity, and interruption.

By bringing a historically slow, contemplative medium into a mode of directness and urgency, the artist engages with oil painting as a contemporary act—one that is deeply sensory and reflective. Here, the domestic and symbolic are not backgrounded but placed front and centre. Objects become vessels. Figures claim space. And the feminine is not just depicted; it is rearticulated.

This series of red-hued oil paintings explores the intimate terrain of agency, femininity, and renewal. Centred around the tulip—a flower at once delicate and unyielding—these works trace the arc of womanhood.

Rouge is both a celebration and a love note in red: to blooming, to passion, to holding one's own.

Rouge will run from August 22nd - August 29th at 7D Wandoo Street, Fortitude Valley