A painting by Rachel Lancaster of the crop of a person wearing a knitted jumper

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 ‘Untitled’, Lancaster depicts a cable-knit sweater in a shadowy half-light. Her use of colour, light and tone has an eerie, almost subaqueous effect, a strange sense of the disembodied or concealed. By omitting her subject’s context, Lancaster plays with notions of meaning and aesthetic control; she manipulates cropping, colour and mark-making to play on the latent, dreamlike otherness encountered in both photography and painting. ‘Untitled’ alludes to some distant narrative, a promise of illumination, but ultimately, characteristically, keeps us in the dark.

Rachel Lancaster

Related Artist

Rachel Lancaster

London

Newcastle