Laura Lancaster

This new body of work by Laura Lancaster is drawn together from themes emerging through her recent practice exploring aspects of the uncanny, the subconscious, and shared authorship. Through the painterly reanimation of the discarded photographic image, Lancaster explores her ideas of the figurative painter as medium and necromancer. “The work in the current exhibition at Workplace London has an intentionally darker tone than previous work. I chose to select images of clowns, people in fancy dress and wearing masks. This kind of imagery has interested me for some time and I wanted to focus my work for this exhibition on a specific theme.This work focuses on the nature of the encounter between the viewer and the work, creating a charged confrontation. This new body of work develops on from ideas of reanimation and rescue of found inert images and presents the subjects of these paintings as a series of characters trapped in limbo. Rather than simply elevating the banal or mundane to the monumental, this work investigates a more fluid relationship between images and their reading when re-contextualised. The image of the clown presents an opportunity for new layers of meaning: the idea of two faces at once, with both being equally "real" or "true", and also the painting of a photograph of someone wearing a mask adds another layer to this. In a way, the painting is also a mask, that simultaneously reveals information whilst also making us constantly aware of the painting’s constructed nature.” Laura Lancaster, 2014

Laura Lancaster was born in 1979 and lives and works in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK. Recent exhibitions include: Private Utopia: Contemporary Art from the British Council Collection, Tokyo Station Gallery, Itami City Museum of Art, the Museum of Art, Kochi and Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art; Laura Lancaster, Wooson Gallery, Deagu, Korea; Conversations Behind Glass Workplace Gallery, Gateshead, UK; Painting past Present, Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK; 40 Years of Women Artists from the Private Collection New Art Gallery Walsall, UK; John Moores Painting Prize, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool; ROTATE, Contemporary Art Society, UK; Ego Documents, The Autobiographical in Contemporary Art, Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland; Micro Narratives, Musee d'Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne; Incontri, in the Accademia d'Ungheria a Roma; Past as Present, York Art Gallery; Giardino Luoghi Della Piccola Realta, Palazzo Della Arte Napolii; Local Stories, Museum of Modern Art Oxford; Blue Star Red Wedge, Glasgow International; When I Lived in Modern Times, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, UK; Laura Lancaster, DLI Museum, Durham, UK; New Works on Paper by Laura Lancaster, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK.