Laura Van Duren
Instagram: @laura_van_duren
Website: https://www.lauravanduren.com/
Bio: Laura Van Duren is an interdisciplinary artist based in Oakland, California, recognized for her innovative approach to ceramics, and mixed-media sculpture. Her practice often merges drawing, ceramics, glycerin soap, and recycled materials, reflecting a commitment to experimentation and abstraction. She works with the Peter Voulkos family helping to manage the archival aspect of his collection which has had a profound influence on her creative process.
Van Duren’s work has been exhibited at major institutions across the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Crocker Museum (as part of the feminist exhibition Making Moves), Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, Sonoma Museum of Art, Southern Exposure, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Paul Thiebaud Gallery and Berkeley Art Center. She is dedicated to arts education, teaching ceramics and sculpture as an adjunct professor at several community colleges. Her achievements in the field include residencies, such as the Open Studio residency at Haystack in Maine (2023), Dream Farm Commons in Oakland (2025) and Okuyama House Japan (2026). Notably, her work has been acquired by The Crocker Art Museum.
Van Duren holds a BFA in drawing from Carnegie Mellon University and she completed her MFA in sculpture at San Francisco State University in 2017.
Statement: How do our bodies influence our minds? How does our corporeal wisdom shape our perception of the world? These questions are at the heart of my practice. Through the tactile processes of coiling, casting, and reassembling, I mirror the adaptive, playful negotiation between body and thought—inviting intuition to guide the emergence of each work and allowing the irrational to transcend the rational.
My inquiry is grounded in the science of interoception: the subtle awareness of inner bodily sensations. I am fascinated by how our internal physical states ripple outward, coloring emotional landscapes and filtering our encounters with the world. I transform clay, glycerin, and found objects into an evolving vocabulary—each material a metaphor for tissue and cell, pulse and synapse, the layered interdependence of the body’s systems. Like the architecture of our own flesh, these forms rest in delicate tension, always contingent on one another for meaning and stability.
