Rachel Lancaster

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 ‘Sleep Grip’, a large-scale oil painting, Lancaster tests the boundaries of realism. The work depicts a close-up bedroom scene, its quotidian objects rendered in gentle, muted tones, calm and unremarkable. Yet clouds of feathers, erupting from the fabrics, interrupt this atmosphere, injecting a mysterious, dynamic force into the scene – freeing both the brushstrokes and their subject from the confines of reality. The literal and psychological realms of sleep, Lancaster enigmatically, playfully suggests, are not always predictable or static.