A painting by Laura Lancaster of a woman with red hair submerged in a body of water 

Laura Lancaster’s paintings are drawn from found imagery, collected from anonymous analogue photographs and film. She transposes the lost and discarded memories of strangers into an ambiguous territory between abstraction and figuration, shifting between the sentimental and the grotesque. Confronting a gendered history of painting, Lancaster draws on a range of influences, including Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lovis Corinth and James Ensor. Subverting notions of authorial autonomy, her work becomes a conduit through which the lives of the lost and nameless are connected with our own.

Through Lancaster’s use of blurred figuration and her hazy, phantasmal painting style, the acrylic work ‘TBC’ has a dreamy quality: hovering between abstraction and clear representation, its style re-enacts the liminal space between the real and unreal states that its subject occupies, and blends her into ambiguous continuity with her background. Depicting a woman immersed in a natural landscape, Lancaster plays with traditional painterly conceptions of femininity, portraiture and the pastoral – by roughening the brushstrokes, obscuring her face and refusing minute detail, Lancaster keeps the viewer at a distance, limiting our gaze. Equally, the image seems familiar, existing in a place of uncanny, collective memory.

Laura Lancaster

Related Artist

Laura Lancaster

London

Newcastle