SR Lejeune has made a career as an artist by noticing what others normally gloss over. While many people might not think twice about something like the markings on a sidewalk, Lejeune documented and recreated them in prints for their series “witness marks.”
That series of prints is just a small example of their larger works and the themes that reverberate throughout them. Their latest exhibition, “A floor for Laurel,” is currently being displayed at the Turchin Center for Visual Arts.
Lejeune’s career as an artist started in 2015 when they attended Oberlin College and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts. In their final semester at Oberlin, they attended a month-long course in papermaking and fell in love with the process. The course sparked Lejeune’s interest in documenting what is normally passed over. They called what they document “the everyday spaces where history is written”
After graduating from Oberlin College, they went on to be a Core Fellow at the Penland School of Craft for two years. The paper-making facility was demolished and rebuilt for the majority of their time at Penland, so Lejeune was forced to create their sculptures with other materials, mainly metal and enamel.
After finishing their fellowship with Penland, Lejeune was hired back to be a studio coordinator for the newly rebuilt paper studio. After two years in that position, they went on to earn their master’s degree in sculpture at Yale University. Since earning their master’s, Lejeune has held several residencies, with their current one at the School of Art + Design at Purchase College.
While Lejeune was at Penland, they used facilities that had been used for decades, and while they were a Core Fellow, they stayed in a building known as Marvin Hall, which they said stood for over one hundred years. As a studio coordinator, Lejeune shared that they stayed in a cabin known as “Henry’s Hotel,” named after the former head chef at Penland and original resident of the cabin after its 1933 construction.
These facilities got Lejeune thinking about how they stay still while people are moving through them over time and the relationship between person and place that forms with that.
“I ended up thinking a lot about the structures that stay still amongst these shifting streams of people, about the way that we shaped those spaces, and about the way that those spaces are also always shaping us,” Lejeune said.
This led them to create their first piece with these themes, a recreation of a height chart on the wall of Marvin Hall. The chart had names that stretched back to the ‘80s, and the original has since been painted over due to renovations. Lejeune titled their recreation “Do you measure up?,” a nod to both its physical height and the pressures left by the legacy of one’s predecessors.
With this developed motif in their art, friends quickly pointed Lejeune toward an abandoned house on the property of Penland. The building, known as Laurel Cottage, was first built in 1905 and had served as a family home, dormitory, and fellows’ housing before being abandoned 111 years after it was first built, Lejeune said. Their artistic preoccupation with the spaces that people move through, combined with the history of Laurel Cottage, led to the creation of “A floor for Laurel,” the piece currently on exhibition at the Turchin Center.
“A floor for Laurel” is a paper cast of the floor of one of the bedrooms in Laurel Cottage. The floor was cast board by board, and is laid out in a recreation of the room. Every choice made in the exhibition was intentional, from the symbolism in casting the boards in paper to the paint colors chosen for the walls of the room.
“A floor for Laurel” will be on display at the Turchin Center until April 4.
