Lauren Clay’s wall reliefs, freestanding sculptures, and room-scale installations are constructed from hand-carved panels, marbled paper, and oil paint. She creates illusionistic surfaces, carrying forward an ancient dialogue between sculpture and painting. These works take on the appearance of marble and other materials, to create an illusion of permanence and monumentality. In Clay's work, the marble is simulated, the columns bear no load, and the carved windows frame no view, but bring awareness to the act of looking itself. Since Alberti, painting has defined itself as a window, creating the question of what a surface is, what it depicts, and what it conceals. Clay’s work holds this tension of opposites. It is simultaneously a painting and a painted object, illusion and material, image and experience. Clay builds passages between two architectures: the one we stand in and the ones we carry internally.

Clay was raised in the American South, where the aura of authority is constructed using architectural forms of ancient empires, and wood and plaster are painted to resemble marble that was never locally available. Deliberately using that logic in her work, Clay’s techniques and materials come from the largely anonymous decorative trades. Employing a material language traditionally consigned to the lesser, gendered category against which fine art defines itself, her sculptures and installations incorporate hand-carved surfaces, the paper marbling of bookbinders, and the faux marble of house painters. She deploys these at architectural scale and as meticulously handmade objects. These architectonic paintings operate as both image and object, intervention and facade.

Clay's forms are drawn from the ornamented threshold of sacred architecture. In her work, the arcade, the niche, the window and arch are openings designed to lure the gaze toward what cannot be seen. In this work, a room papered floor to ceiling in shifting marbled pattern becomes an architecture of the soul, in a lineage of interior sacred space running from Teresa of Ávila's interior castle to Aldo Rossi's analogous city of memory. Multiplied across sculptures and installations, these openings promise a space beyond the wall that the viewer must supply.