Lorsen Camps, Sophy King, Kurt Hickson were selected for a commission award as part of Worcester OPEN 2023, Climate Change Edition, in celebration of the launch of Meadow Arts current exhibition Watermark, a contemporary art exhibition exploring water, flooding and the climate crisis across venues in Worcester until 3 June 2023.

This week we’ll be focusing on Coventry based artist Lorsen Camps and his winning piece, Hot Point (2022), currently on display until 30 April 2023 at The Art House, Worcester WR1 3HN.

Worcester OPEN 2023 was a collaboration between  PITT Studio, Meadow Arts, The Art House and University of Worcester School of Arts.

The exhibiting artists were selected by, Anne de Charmant (Artistic Director, Meadow Arts), Hilary Jack (Artist), Pippa Galpin (Artist and Senior Lecturer, University of Worcester), Emalee Beddoes (Independent Curator) and Chloe Roehead-Hughes (Gallery Assistant, PITT Studio). 

You can learn more about Camps work Hot Point (2022) in this blog post written by the artist or you can watch the full video below.

It was a privilege to be named as one of the three winners of the Climate Change Edition of this year’s Worcester OPEN 2023.

Lorsen Camps

As one of the partner organisations for the Open, Meadow Arts have asked me to share a little about me and my practice. I’m a mixed media artist and occasional curator based in Coventry and I re-use and re-purpose objects in my work. Throughout my practice I have been drawn to worthless items which I have redeemed in some way through processes of collecting, re-presenting or utilising as art materials. I have taken things like broken car wing-mirrors, damaged toys from charity shops and washing machine drums, to highlight the beauty in things both discarded and disregarded. My current focus is on polystyrene (or Styrofoam) packaging, a by-product of our consumer culture, and emphasising its aesthetic nature, sculptural form and materiality. I respond differently according to every piece I find. Some items will evoke a connection to something in the world (a face, an animal, something architectural perhaps), others will lead me in new directions or be used as a sort of canvas to paint onto. It’s satisfying to appropriate a material, otherwise heading for landfill, and transforming it art.  

Hot Point (2022) was made using reclaimed polystyrene from a Hot Point appliance onto which I painted a glacial scene with an iceberg at the centre. As has become all too evident, the world’s climate is at a ‘hot point’; a calamitous danger zone. Consequently, for my work I chose warm paint colours with a bright red sky acting like a warning sign. I have added a textural element to the work too by picking away at the surface of the polystyrene and drawing attention to the material nature of the polystyrene itself. The work is extremely fragile and this seems wholly appropriate with its subject relating to the environment.  

At the moment I am part way through another sculptural polystyrene piece where I’m painting the individual dots or beads on the polystyrene’s surface. It’s incredibly time consuming and requires a fair bit of patience (and lots of breaks for my eyes and neck!), but it’s now taking shape and hopefully I’ll finish it next month. Over the next few months I will also be working with the Mead Gallery at Warwick Arts Centre as an Artist in Residence. I will be running a number of family workshops and schools engagement sessions in relation to their forthcoming exhibition, so I’m really looking forward to that!   

If you’d like to see more of my work please check out my website www.lorsencamps.com or Instagram @lorsencamps. 

Thanks! 

Image: Hot Point (2022), acrylic and household paint on reclaimed polystyrene.
Dimensions: 70cm (h) x 68cm (w) x 11cm (d).