Artist Statement

Lana Raine is a writer and multidisciplinary artist from upstate New York. She uses the body as both subject and tool to explore intimacy, shame, memory, and connection. Grounded in feminine consciousness, spirituality, and dreamwork, her work embraces discomfort with radical honesty, using vulnerability, absurdity, and humor as tools for truth-telling. Attuned to the natural world and the subconscious, she challenges passive consumption to invite embodied dialogue.

Lana Raine goes by many names, occupies many personas, and is drawn towards many mediums.

Lana Raine has self published two poetry books.

My work is an ongoing exploration of truth and desire; uncovering, confronting, and questioning contradictory personal truths through documentation, experimentation, and action. My creative process is a deeply personal journey which seeks to challenge subconscious fears and desires to better understand how they influence identity, relationships, and our engagement with the natural world.

Working across various mediums—including painting, performance, sculpture, and text—I aim to create multi-layered experiences that invite emotional, intellectual, and visceral engagement. By utilizing found and sourced materials, highly charged imagery, personal narrative, and subconscious recordings I aim to understand and give compassion towards the complexities of our human experience.

At the heart of my practice is an attempt of radical honesty. I am interested in themes of intimacy, the natural world, and the body. I use vulnerability, discomfort, and humor to engage with the contradictions and tensions that arise when confronting difficult truths and desires.

i am an artist, writer, and performer deeply rooted in a process of self-exploration. My work is an ongoing journey to understand my identity, my place within the community, and the relationship between my body, mind, spirit, and nature. Drawing inspiration from my childhood in upstate New York, where I developed a profound connection to the natural world, I explore the intersections of nature, sexuality, trauma, feminism, and healing. My work spans multiple mediums—including painting, writing, performance, video, screen printing, and sculpture—as an attempt to examine the complexities of the human experience.

My practice is guided by an intense curiosity about the subconscious and the deeply personal process of uncovering my true self. Dreams, trauma, shame, and the body are central themes in my work, with text often serving as my primary vehicle for understanding and communicating these ideas. As a second-generation American, coming from a lineage shaped by the trauma and resilience of Holocaust survivors who fled Europe to escape Nazi persecution, generational trauma plays a significant role in my life and therefore my art; as does my family’s Jungian influence, and persistent health conditions that have shaped my early childhood experiences. Mental health, chronic pain, and nightmares have always had a hold on my life, and therefore inform my art practice. All of my pain has led me to constantly analyze and reflect on how both the human and (specifically) the feminine (not female) experiences are shaped by both pain and resilience. Tenderness and fierceness are the only ways through, and i aim to explore these ideas without necessarily providing answers, but instead engaging in an open, ongoing exploration.

My work is an act of exploration, not explanation. i make the work first, then reflect on it. My work is intuitive, instinctual, spiritual, sometimes intellectual, and always primal.