In Context: Laura Lancaster | Rachel Lancaster

  • Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster interview at Workplace, London, 2023. Video credit: Matt Denham. Courtesy of the artists and Workplace, UK.
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    Workplace is pleased to launch In Context, a new series in which works from our current gallery exhibition are explored in greater depth.
     
    This first edition will present works from Cadence - an exhibition of new paintings by identical 'mirror' twins, Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster.
     
     
  • Rachel Lancaster edits and translates photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, from found moving imagery and her own photographs. She depicts...
    Rachel Lancaster, A Gathering, 2022, Oil on canvas, 100 x 80 cm

    Rachel Lancaster edits and translates photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, from found moving imagery and her own photographs. She depicts detailed fragments divorced from greater narratives, rendering these fragments both descriptive and abstract, suspenseful and open-ended; within this, her strategic use of ambiguity creates resonant pauses, allowing emotional undercurrents to come forth and find resolve.

     

    In ‘A Gathering’, Lancaster plays with notions of decontextualization and mystery: an object is shrouded in fabric, both its external contexts and internal content unknown. Through these omissions, the work is imbued with a curiously psychological charge and a direct relation to the viewer. Lancaster foregrounds the material immediacy and patterning of the fabric, yet its presence is contingent on absence; simultaneously, the work’s subject demands our attention, yet refuses to reveal what lies within.

     

    The title directly references the imagery of the gathered fabric on the top of the intricately rendered parcel, yet also alludes to the gathering of information and imagery, a core facet in Lancaster's practice. 

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    For the series that I've been working on of the really tightly cropped images of parcels, I was really interested in the specifics of the texture of each of the kinds of paper, and how you almost touch it with your eyes as you're looking over the surface.
     
    - Rachel Lancaster, 2023

      

     

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    My work is trying to explore the potential of different images and the potential for painting to change the meaning of found imagery

     

    - Laura Lancaster, 2023

      

     

  • The figure is central to the work of Laura Lancaster, its presence intensified by the opposing entropic force of abstraction...
    Laura Lancaster, Visitor, 2022, Acrylic on linen, 210 x 160 cm

    The figure is central to the work of Laura Lancaster, its presence intensified by the opposing entropic force of abstraction which perpetually subsumes and engulfs the protagonist. Images that are of their era - located in time through incidental clues such as clothing, pose, and contingent detail - are monumentalised by Laura through painting.

     

    Rendered ambiguous through the looseness of her brushwork, images gleaned from found photographic images are dissociated from their specific context and orphaned from their original narrative to be re-presented as fragments. Through this process of isolation and dislocation her works become uncanny and symbolic, operating as signifiers of a wider, collective memory and a shared existential consciousness.

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  • ‘Thin Green Candle’ is a domestic still life. Lancaster conveys a sense of warmth in the colour palette and the...
    Rachel Lancaster, Thin Green Candle, 2022, Oil on canvas, 60 x 76 cm

    ‘Thin Green Candle’ is a domestic still life. Lancaster conveys a sense of warmth in the colour palette and the use of light, a quotidian softness and unity more fully realised, here, than in many of her works.

     

    The objects exist in a quiet dialogue of light and shadow, glowing and reflecting off their surfaces, from the houseplant leaves to the glass. Characteristically, the scene is a fragment of a larger photographic ‘still’ – yet the painting equally communicates a new, faintly reassuring sense of compositional wholeness.

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    A lot of the images reference still life or Vanitas painting, in that I'm taking an everyday object and then trying to elevate it through the process of painting.

     

    - Rachel Lancaster, 2023

      

     

  • Cadence walkthrough. Video credit: Matt Denham. Courtesy of the artists and Workplace, UK.
  • For the paintings in Cadence, I've made a few images where the face is actually quite monumental in scale so...
    Laura Lancaster, Late one night, 2022, Acrylic on linen, 150 x 120 cm

    For the paintings in Cadence, I've made a few images where the face is actually quite monumental in scale so it almost becomes a painting of a sculpture. The larger paintings relate more to my body or the scale of a body, where the smaller paintings are more intimate. There's also that feeling of how I want the viewer to relate to the paintings that's brought out with the scale.

     

    - Laura Lancaster, 2023

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  • ‘T-Shirt’ is a subversive and playfully unconventional portrait. Drawing on traditional oil painting portraiture, it depicts a figure in profile,...
    Rachel Lancaster,T-Shirt, 2022, Oil on canvas, 50 x 60 cm

    ‘T-Shirt’ is a subversive and playfully unconventional portrait. Drawing on traditional oil painting portraiture, it depicts a figure in profile, head and shoulders filling the frame. Yet in presenting the subject with her head concealed, Lancaster literally paints a layer of complication and disruption between viewer and subject – as if we have, at once, both caught this subject off-guard, and failed to catch sight of her at all.

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  • In my paintings there’s a consciousness in retaining a sense of touch or a haptic sensibility - I like to...
    Laura Lancaster, Untitled, 2022, Acrylic on linen, 120 x 150 cm

    In my paintings there’s a consciousness in retaining a sense of touch or a haptic sensibility - I like to think about how the paint can be tactile but can still describe something.

    - Laura Lancaster, 2023

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  • I’ve started editing the images more before I paint them, cropping them or adding colour to black and white images....
    Laura Lancaster, Elsewhere, 2022, Acrylic on linen, 160 x 210 cm

    I’ve started editing the images more before I paint them, cropping them or adding colour to black and white images. I create paintings at various scales depending on the subject matter to highlight different elements of the image that I want to bring out.

    - Laura Lancaster, 2023

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  • Laura Lancaster (b.1979, Hartlepool, UK) lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her BA in Fine Art...

    Laura Lancaster (b.1979, Hartlepool, UK) lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University. Recent solo exhibitions include Closer and Further Away, Workplace, London, UK; Inside Mirror, Wooson Gallery, South Korea; Running Towards Nothing, Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Laura Lancaster, New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK; and A Stranger's Dream, Sargent's Daughters, New York, NY. She has been included in group exhibitions at Marlborough Gallery, London, UK; Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, Sunderland, UK; New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK; Royal Academy, London, UK; Museum of Art, Kochi, Japan; Itami City Museum of Art, Hyogo/Osaka, Japan; and Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand.

     

    Rachel Lancaster (b.1979, Hartlepool, UK) lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her MFA in Fine Art at Newcastle University and her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University. She has exhibited widely and taken part in numerous projects, performances and artist residencies both nationally and internationally. She has been included in group exhibitions at The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough, UK; Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK; Art Spot Korin, Kyoto, Japan and Venice, Italy; Royal Academy, London, UK; Rye Art Gallery, Kent, UK; Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield, UK; Baltic 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; and Kotti-Shop, Berlin, Germany.