Lori Esposito is a transdisciplinary artist focusing on durational art and memory work. She explores sensory ecologies to connect differently with environments, without labeling and false divides between nature and humans. Entanglements with environments and materials include plant-based dyeing, textile performances, evaporation, seeding stones, and many other movements of thought.
Her research is arts-based and post-qualitative, exploring conditions for neurodiverse connection through materials and more-than-human temporalities. Her doctoral work explores perceptual tools she developed over an eight-year period of walking with evaporating dishes of water and ink. In this walking-as-transformative-practice, she and her companions non-verbally share emotional intensities across carried bodies of water. Through materialist discourses around healing and duration, she explores the embodied conditions for writing and listening as uniquely resonant in each situation and circumstance. Esposito has worked with groups in various geographic and cultural locations, aligning shared and individual frequencies, color play, and weather with movement. Since the pandemic, her work with digital integration reaches toward new intimacies from a distance, and at different arrival times. Esposito’s work is inspired by walking histories, anthropology, land-based art, and feminist performance.
A note about Esposito’s representational work, which is presented on this website: Esposito has a background in illustration and design. Her suburban, coastal coming of age in the 90’s informs the subject matter of her work, a hodge-podge of hybridized cultural meanings. Her drawing practices are also associative – energetically engaging in an overwhelm of mall rat culture, during the rise of gaming consoles, sticker books, and skateboard art. This work carried into her practice based durational work as a return to ordinary and nostalgic movement. These desires to be evaporated by sun, wind, and atmosphere materialize as perceptual and segmented play across digital and analog platforms.
Esposito’s work has received support from the Ohio Arts Council, the Ucross Foundation, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, and residencies such as the Santa Fe Arts Institute. She has designed courses and taught workshops at various universities, K-12 schools, cultural centers and non-profit organizations. She is currently a doctoral candidate in the Arts Education, Administration and Policy program at The Ohio State University, where she is developing writing and artistic practices accessible to neurodiverse audiences and learners.
