Rachel Lancaster

Come Back To Me A While (2025) is a near-square oil on linen (140 x 150 cm) whose economy of detail announces itself at first as a fragment of memory. A cropped sweep of fabric, the softened suggestion of skin or hair and an off-register pool of light press against a luminous white ground. Lancaster composes the surface from successive thin glazes: colour seems to float behind the skin of the linen, while smudged edges and rubbed-out marks dissolve specificity into haze. The muted pastel and warm neutral palette—its low, analogue saturation—recalls the backlit, degraded glow of pre-digital videotape; at this scale those ordinarily incidental cinematic fragments acquire a quietly monumental presence that insists on both intimacy and duration in the gallery space.

The work exemplifies Lancaster’s project of translating cropped stills from 1980s–90s moving-image vernacular into paint, a method that stages the slippage between photographic index and painterly facture. Her incremental building and selective removal of paint produces what might be read as a temporal suspension: a “moment before” or “moment after” in which narrative causality has been excised and emotional charge remains. Seen alongside the two-person presentation Remember, Somewhere, where Rachel’s delicate accretional surfaces sit against her sister Laura’s more immediate alla prima gestures, Come Back To Me A While clarifies a contemporary concern with analogue media noise, domestic close-up, and the gendered intimacies of cinematic fragments. The painting’s restraint—its oscillation between description and evaporation—makes absence legible as a tactile, optical event rather than a mere metaphor.