​Lauryn Arnott’s love of history and her drawing abilities earned her, the international art prize, the 2006 Association of Commonwealth Universities Art Prize in a competition titled   “...a place in the world” , with her drawing titled Journey Home, awarded by Nobel laureate author, John Coetzee. 
 
Arnott was born in Kitwe, Northern Rhodesia, before it became independent, Zambia. Her childhood was divided between Northern Rhodesia, Zambia, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa, and later Zimbabwe; where she first hand, experienced and witnessed the consequences of Colonial history .She states ’ At birth I was damned with the weight of guilt and complicity; if I did something about my position, others alienated me, if I did nothing I was being wicked within a wicked system -  it was a case of being born the wrong or the right colour or being born in the wrong or the right time.'
 
After loosing her home, she fled President Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe and arrived in Australia in 2003. As a refugee from political difficulties, her work reflects a deep understanding of the complexities of cultural acclimatisation and the need to adapt flexible approaches to living in different contexts. She is passionate about ideas relating to the female body, home and history, and has a longstanding engagement with debates on identity, migration, gender and women’s histories. 
 
     Arnott  states ....   "There is something about the sensibility of being foreign, a feeling of not being accepted or acceptable, which is most apparent when, as a woman, you arrive in the strange world of art where most of the citizens are men and where the fate of women has not been settled. As a white African, you are perceived as separate from your place of birth and the country of your origin. So, sometimes you are a double outsider, moving between one or two or several places at once. As an artist I draw from this position of uncertainty as I find it to be a great source of creative inspiration and symbolic wealth."