Lauren Rufford
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Project A
Project B
Project C
Project D
Frames of Absence
November 2025
A photographic series exploring memory, identity and loss through layered digital and 35mm film imagery. Grainy textures, deep blue tones and OHP projection create a visual language of fragility and instability, where shadows dirstort, figures hover between presence and absence and the familiar becomes unsettling. The work draws on Freudian ideas of melancholia to construct illusions of return, resisting certainty and embracing the vulnerability of forgetting.
Moments Left Unfinished
January 2026
A short film project using VHS, projection and shadow to create imagery that feels unstable and unresolved, each object held in time, glitching and shifting. The work questions whether familiar cinematic techniques can be reappropriated to change their meaning, drawing on film noir aesthetics to create a space where looking becomes critical rather than passive. Presented through short moving image clips from the film.
Space for Stillness
March 2026
A pair of cyanotype animations capturing a river in sunlight and flowers in a vase, tracing the quiet, inevitable movement of time. The cyanotype process lends each frame a delicate, almost melancholic quality, reflecting on transience and the stillness found within passing moments. Contact sheets from the animation process are included, revealing the work behind each sequence, and showing the changing moments in each frame.
Inward Gaze
Current
A series combining film photography and VHS video to explore female interiority, shifting focus from how a woman looks to how she feels. Warm, inhabited film photographs of private, domestic moments sit alongside cold, fragmented VHS footage moving from landscape through uncanny angel statues to intimate close-ups of eyes. Together they form two sides of the same interior world, the lived and the unconscious beneath it