Three Women with Braids
2015
Edwardsville, Illinois
A self-taught artist, Lauren dela Roche fully embraced her talents at the encouragement of her friend and peer Tynan Kerr. Having worked the sugar beet harvests in North Dakota, they spent their free hours in a heated trailer drawing to no end. In 2012, she exhibited her first full body of work at Modern Times Cafe in Minneapolis, and shortly after was awarded the Jerome Emerging Artist Fellowship. Dela Roche was then included in a number of group shows leading to her first solo show at Bockley Gallery (2016). She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant and today her works are in the permanent collections of the North Dakota Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and numerous private collections. Roche currently lives and works in St Louis MO, and maintains a cabin in rural Minnesota, to which she and her partner return often.
Painters & Sculptors Grant, 2018
I draw emotional inspiration from the beautiful complexity of the women in my life and my relationship to my own identity, femininity, and body. Recently, I have been sourcing antique cotton feed sacks and stitching them together to create large canvases for my acrylic paintings.”