Lauren Cory’s cosy Scottish landscapes combine retro gaming graphics and traditional textile patterns

With the focus of her illustrations always arriving at colour, Lauren Cory’s work lends itself to the bright and blendable palette of the Risograph – a print technique that leaves room for both harsh pixels and soft rural sunsets. Taking inspiration for her landscape drawings from abstract painters such as Milton Avery and Henry Matisse, and what she describes as their “use of unconventional colours to evoke certain emotions in our everyday”, Lauren’s work distils a quiet sense of belonging into warm pastel studies. When translating these works into Riso prints, she finds that the limited range of inks helps to smoothly blend the colours of her wild Scottish landscapes into “more believable worlds”.

Through her recent residency at Out of the Blue Print, a Riso print studio in Edinburgh, Lauren developed her landscape drawings, taking influence from vintage gaming aesthetics and traditional textile crafts. Initially interested in the idea of turning Risograph prints into video games, she was keen to explore “digital-based visual languages [...] and how the Risograph can make these languages physical”, she says. As the works developed, she found herself drawn to repetitive pattern making and pixel art, drawing inspiration from “medieval tapestries” to “cross-stitch samplers and knitting patterns” as well as “world maps from older Pokémon games”. Combining these influences with her love of analogue process, she introduced these organised pixelated worlds into her cosy landscapes, arriving on the series of prints that formed her solo exhibition, Homestead.

As the name suggests, a large part of Homestead is about trying to capture the familiarity of home, and Lauren hopes that people can place themselves in her prints and “relate them to landscapes personal to their own lives”, she says. As for her pixelated motifs, she feels that this is a “universal visual language that everyone has a reaction to” and something that only adds to the nostalgia and comfort of viewing her small town scenes. With her reduced graphic squares depicting trees, picket fences, snails and flowers amongst other tiny things, Lauren wants her digital pattern making to encourage viewers to slow down and trace the smaller details, creating space for an “appreciation of the natural world around us”.

Following her residency at Out of the Blue Print, Lauren was invited to display her work in Musings, a duo show with Joanna Blémon, which is currently on show at the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People in Edinburgh. So what’s next for Lauren? Well, she will soon be setting sail (quite literally) on her next residency with Sail Britain. On this journey, she is hoping to develop her landscape drawings further, “with a focus on documenting remote Scottish islands”, and new abstract scenes, all whilst out at sea.