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 Lancaster 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.

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 The 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.

Lancaster’s work is included in The British Council Collection, UK; New Art Gallery, Walsall, UK; Nerman Museum, Kansas, USA; and The Government Art Collection, UK. Her work has been published in Vitamin P3: New Perspectives in Painting for Phaidon Press, and Picturing People by Charlotte Mullins for Thames and Hudson.