For the past decade, I’ve admired Lauren Fensterstock’s work from a museum-
approved distance. I can remember the first time I saw her distinctively baroque, fantastically textured sculptures on view at the Portland Museum of Art. Inside the staid halls, her black-painted pieces seemed to creep and grow with a life of their own, an implied movement that captivated and vaguely discomfited me. Her large assemblages of cheap, small beauties (shells, beads, flowers) pulled at me like a magnet, a siren calling to a magpie. Look closer; don’t touch.

I didn’t expect to end up in her studio. Encountering work in this kind of official institution implies an impossibility of intimacy. You don’t meet Monet, you can’t talk to Homer, and you don’t share tea with Lauren Fensterstock. Except she’s alive, teaching students at the Rhode Island School of Design, and working right here in Portland, in an unassuming garage down by the waterfront. Here, she unveils the genesis of her newest body of work, a series of sculptures inspired by the most discomfiting force I can imagine: the infinite emptiness, the absolute darkness, the distant promise of a black hole.

Humans haven’t verified the physical existence of black holes (yet), though we can examine them closely through mathematical models. In theory, a black hole forms when a massive star dies and collapses in on itself, pulling neighboring matter into its devouring mouth. A black hole is an absence, a place of undoing—the opposite of creation and growth. “When I was doing work with gardens, I was interested in how gardens were a metaphor for how we felt in the world. It was always a coded element,” Fensterstock explains. Gardens are a place where people affect nature, and vice versa. They exist on a human scale, on an earthly plane. “Now,” she says, “I’m taking away the proxies and talking more directly about mysticism, metaphysics, spirituality.” In this new chapter, she’s responding to two big concepts: “The first is Buddhist philosophy, and the other is the idea of nothingness.”

How does one build nothingness? If you’re Fensterstock, you start with a drawing. One wall of her large studio is covered with black pen-and-ink sketches of abstracted heavenly bodies (spheres, conoids, tori, stellated polyhedrons) interspersed with images of trees, lotus flowers, and swirling black lines. Many sketches feature lotus-like objects erupting from spheres or intersecting with the black stars. “When it came to black holes, I kept looking at these renderings of what a black hole could look like, but they’re not the actual black hole,” she says. “It’s one interpretation. I’m living in a space of flexibility.” Through these drawings, she explores the possible forms her sculptures could take. The idea is to create a series of pieces that draw from her knowledge and experience of the human body (she’s a dedicated practitioner of Ashtanga yoga), the concept of personal transformation (internal and external), and the ego-stripping epiphanies of Buddhism.

She’s already completed her first few pieces in this vein, including one huge sculpture, “The Totality of Time Lusters the Dusk,” which is currently stored in several huge wooden boxes by the entrance to her studio. The all-black comet, complete with a 45-foot tail and a cluster of surrounding clouds, was recently on display at the Smithsonian Renwick Gallery. Another sculpture, the first in her lotus series (“The Heart of Negation”) was recently acquired by the Minneapolis Institute of Art. While some of her work does go into private collections, Fensterstock knows the importance of making art that’s accessible to the public. “That piece, in particular, I wanted it to be where people could see it,” she says. “I don’t make that much work because it takes so long. Last year I made only three pieces.”

On a wooden table in the middle of her studio rests a much smaller piece, a work-in-progress with its wire guts on display. This one is destined to spend some time in New York. “I work with Claire Oliver gallery in Harlem, and we have a show in November,” she says. “This is the first piece towards that show.” Visitors to the gallery can expect a new, slightly lighter and more mystical side of Fensterstock. After years of working with an all-black palette, she’s recently begun including white, transparent, and gold material in her work. “I have always just loved black,” she says. “I grew up in the ’80s, and I was a super goth.” She was also quite taken with the idea of the Claude Glass, a convex pocket mirror named for seventeenth-century painter Claude Lorrain. Hundreds of years ago, people took these dark portals on vacation with them, staring at the backward, monochrome landscape in their palms, much like we look at our phones today. “I think I’m moving from the convex mirror to the scrying mirror,” she says. This means, I assume, that she’s no longer seeking to depict gardens askew. She’s trying to make a statement about the nature of existence.

“I’m interested in order and disorder and how these things work together,” she explains. She says this standing in front of a backdrop of floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with labeled Tupperware, each containing a specific type of glass or a particular-shape bead. There’s obviously a structure here, just as there’s a rigid series of poses to follow in Ashtanga, and just as there are mathematical rules that describe the functions of a black hole. We may not always be able to perceive the alignment, but things do fall into place. “I like to play with those ideas in my work,” she says. “I make a system of how I’m going to make something, whether it’s cutting paper or gluing shells, and then within that, there’s a lot of play.” She constructs the parameters around her sculptures first, then fills in the surfaces intuitively, putting it together like a puzzle (except there’s no picture on the box to follow). The glittering bodies emerge, bit by bit: fantastical gardens, floating comets, shooting stars, and dark clouds—all encrusted with tiny, pretty things (“Women’s things and amateur crafts,” she says, “that’s what I like to work with”). From these fragments of matter, she crafts a story, one where everything has its place. “It’s about finding the relationships between each piece. When you find two things that fit, and you know they fit, that’s so good,” she says. “When you know it’s right? I live for those moments.”