Lauren Richelieu is an artist and nature enthusiast living and working in New England. She grew up along the coast of Maine, where she spent most of her childhood outdoors creating potions out of muddy water and weeds, and hunting down little salamanders that make their homes under piles of dead leaves. It was in these moments that her love for the wilderness flourished. 

As Lauren’s interest in art grew, so did nature’s presence in her work. Merging these two curiosities became a way for her to process and communicate with the world around her. Early on in her career, she started making emotion driven pieces using metaphor found in bones, organs, flora, and fauna. Driven by a desire to represent natural history in a realistic and compelling way, her portfolio consists of careful renderings of life and death unfolding in the wilderness. 

In her work, Lauren focuses on the fragility of ecosystems and both the beautiful and brutal sides of nature. She often illustrates fauna living and dying amid our pollution and collapsing ecosystem. By not only focusing on at-risk species, but also species considered “least concern”, she wishes to inspire action to defend all of nature–not just the nature that we have already begun to erase. Lauren aims to pull inspiration from the environment to create intricate visual narratives of natural history and vanishing ecosystems.