Lauren Opia (b.1998) is a multidisciplinary visual artist, multimedia animator, and filmmaker based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Her work finds significance in the transient states between sentimentality, personal lived experiences and the human psyche, exploring how each individual’s Umwelt shapes their way of living.
Opia’s practice primarily consists of working with glazed ceramics, ink drawings, mixed media animation, and digital artwork. Her work is a tour de force of juxtaposing ceramics and animation — the irregular abstraction of working with clay and the meticulous, repetitive, and delicate process of animation — a balance deeply rooted in, and reflective of, the maelstrom of emotions accompanying the human experience. However, these two mediums are not mutually exclusive in Opia’s practice: they inform each other, sharing similar motifs and figurations characteristic of her multiple oeuvres. These two mediums often meander into each other’s worlds to create a dialogue between Opia’s personal experiences and her unique reality — expressed through her use of colour, figuration and constructed environments.
At the heart of Opia’s animated works are surreal and hallucinatory creations that illustrate the precariousness of human existence. Similarly, her ceramics are created as the antithesis of naturalism, veering away from anything close to the real world. By coalescing and contrasting two wildly different mediums, Opia finds her identity as a visual artist who has the ability to communicate the purest version of herself, a marriage of two different worlds rooted in conceptual storytelling and introspective expression.
