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. 

‘Pull The Strings’ is an unconventional female portrait, a recurring device in Lancaster’s work. In a painting replete with paradox and subverted expectations, Lancaster teases the viewer, concealing her subject’s face, the portrait’s central fact, again and again: her subject dominates the foreground, yet her back is turned; we expect her reflection in the dark background, but find instead theatre masks, unreal simulacra. Semiotically echoed by the masks and the large pink bow, an air of intersecting artifice, performativity and realism pervades the work.

A crop of Rachel Lancaster's painting 'Pull The Strings', 2022 Oil on canvas 60 x 50 cm 23 5/8 x 19 3/4 in. A large pink bow in the hair of a female figure. We see two masks facing us. 

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Installation shots of 'Cadence' by Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster at Workplace | London

Rachel Lancaster

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Rachel Lancaster

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London

Newcastle