Painters Laura and Rachel Lancaster are twins, but their work is anything but identical. Laura’s is energetic, with oil paint thickly applied to pick out figures in landscapes. Meanwhile, Rachel depicts moments of stillness and intimacy in soft shades. They paint in parallel, from the same studio in Newcastle, England, each with her own take on the nuances of memory in our image-dominated culture.

I met Laura and Rachel in their shared studio in the leafy Ouseburn area of Newcastle, just outside of the city center, amid galleries, boutiques, bars, and restaurants. They have been based together in this Grade II-listed converted flax mill for over a decade, part of a studio community that houses creatives over three floors, with a gallery open to the street. Either side of their large, bright space is strewn with paint, palettes, and partially worked canvases.

The two painters’ works are currently on view in the exhibition “Remember, Somewhere” at Baltic, Gateshead, one of the north of England’s major contemporary art institutions. They were born nearby in Hartlepool, and both studied fine art at Northumbria University, graduating in 2001. The pair consider this exhibition to be something of a homecoming. It’s poignant, the sisters explained, to be showing work together in a public gallery for the first time, here in northeastern England, after each has been on a whirlwind tour exhibiting all across the globe.

On Baltic’s third floor gallery, the exhibition opens with Notes Lie Long (2025), a large-scale work by Rachel, which faces the entrance. Sunflower yellow overtakes the viewer’s field of vision in this closely cropped image of a figure seemingly lying flat on their front. Their yellow, knitted cardigan is depicted in deeply textured detail. The work makes an immediate emotional impact, but it’s not clear what narrative it conveys.

In the studio, Rachel explained that rather than coming up with a story, she instead “sets a feeling or intention” for each painting, before allowing it to develop slowly in stages through a series of washes and erasures.

This gauzy effect, creating a stillness in the painting’s composition, is in sharp contrast to her sister’s work. To the left of the gallery entrance at Baltic, Laura’s Long Time Listener (2025) uses thickly applied brush strokes to evoke frenetic movement. Drips of paint appear on the front and sides of the canvas, splashed diagonally as if thrown. A figure perches in a tree against a pale sky, clearly recognizable as a person, but disintegrating into a flurry of individual marks on closer inspection. “I am interested in the point at which an image falls apart,” Laura said, commenting on her conscious choice to depict human faces with “the same amount of detail as a leaf or a rock.”

Throughout “Remember, Somewhere,” Laura’s works, often in a palette of rich blues, greens, and browns, with flashes of pinks and oranges, tempt the viewer towards recognition, though it’s often out of reach. For example, the cut of a garment or a hair style might seem to place the scene in a particular place or time, but never clearly. In Out of Nowhere (2025), a group of women lounge in a lush forest, wearing what looks like modern swimwear but with voluminous coiffed hairstyles skillfully picked out with a few brushstrokes. On the other hand, Rachel’s works are much more comforting, though they also have unsettling elements. She uses a soft pastel and airy neon palette, such as in Closer (2025), where a child’s flyaway hair is seen as if through half-closed eyes.

Both sisters create a sense of ambiguity, though they use different methods and processes. In particular, the artists differ in their use of source material drawn from the detritus of 20th- and 21st-century media. Laura often discovers photographic slides in flea markets to use as source material. She translates these otherwise unseen images into paintings relatively quickly, she told me, in “three sessions; underpainting in acrylic and then finding the marks, which are never permanent.” In the studio, on Laura’s side, a large canvas is propped up with this acrylic underpainting visible, where terracotta orange marks sketch out the placement of figures in a landscape.

Rachel instead bases her work on stills from digital media and online. The moments that she selects evoke closeness and tenderness and are cropped so that the image seems to envelop the viewer. It’s a technique that allows her to cross cultural boundaries. Discussing her recent exhibition, “From Another Room,” at The Shophouse, Hong Kong, Rachel noted how drawing from global digital media meant that Asian viewers could tap into the same familiar ideas as viewers from Newcastle. Similarly, Laura’s landscapes seem recognizable but could be anywhere, and you can imagine viewers at her recent exhibitions in South Korea, Los Angeles, and New York feeling the same.

Many of the works on show in “Remember, Somewhere” are newly commissioned for the exhibition, and the artists explained that they wanted to ensure that their work was shown at a comparable “volume,” both in terms of the amount of paintings on show and how they command space. As identical twin sisters both working in oils but in very different ways, this meant considering how their modes of painting can be read together. While Laura has now worked on larger canvases for several years, for Rachel, the exhibition offered a challenge to upscale, creating works that are, as she put it, “just paint” when viewed closely, but resolve at a distance.

Sitting in the center of the studio where they have worked in parallel for over a decade, the differences in their techniques are conspicuous. For example, Rachel’s palette is piled high with only two colors in all their gradients, adorned with a cloth that I learn is used to wipe back layers of glaze to reveal the pale canvas beneath. Whereas on Laura’s side, tins of mixed paint totter in piles all around. Brushes and spatulas are wedged haphazardly into jars.

Both artists agree that when they graduated from Northumbria University in 2001, painting was, as Rachel put it, “not a fashionable artform to pursue, let alone figurative painting.” After 20 years, the Lancasters’ work has become more on-trend, and even more compelling, within our image-saturated culture and economy of attention. Both artists focus the viewer’s gaze, forcing us to pause. They accentuate the tactility of their painted surfaces in contrast to an image on screen, though each with different ends. For Laura, it’s important that “the paint can be itself”; for Rachel, it’s about the act of viewing creating “an excuse to feel and let the self be sensitive.” They each titillate the viewer, prompting curiosity to know who is depicted and what they are doing. Yet each presents this as a question, asking us to be comfortable in uncertainty.

A press clipping including a photo of Laura and Rachel Lancaster

Artsy

Laura and Rachel Lancaster Are Identical Twin Artists Who Paint Nothing Alike

Rachel Lancaster’s paintings capture the elusive and often overlooked moments of everyday life. With a keen eye for detail and a penchant for the mundane, Lancaster elevates ordinary scenes into enticing, memory-like narratives. Her approach involves extracting and reinterpreting “stills” from various moving images and personal photos. These fragments range from domestic interiors to close-ups of inanimate objects and people—rendered with an ethereal soft focus.

Her technique involves meticulously layering thin glazes of oil paint to create textures that converge, resulting in blurred edges. This pull of the figurative toward the abstract is a hallmark of her work, exemplified by her first solo exhibition at WORKPLACE, “In The Wake,” which is on view in London until January 10th. The artist also made an impression as part of WORKPLACE’s group presentation at NADA in Miami last month.

Lancaster earned her MFA in fine art at Newcastle University in 2011. Since then, she has exhibited in group shows hosted at WORKPLACE, which represents her, as well as Elysium Gallery and Newcastle Contemporary Art.

Artsy Editorial ‘5 Artists on Our Radar in January 2024’ 8 January 2024 Maxwell Rabb

5 Artists on Our Radar in January 2024

Laura and Rachel Lancaster, from Hartlepool, have opened their first joint major art exhibition at Gateshead's Baltic gallery which will run until October 2025.

Itv NEWS Hartlepool twins unveil ‘dream’ joint art Baltic art exhibition Sun 13 Apr 2025

Hartlepool twins unveil ‘dream’ joint art Baltic art exhibition

Identical twin sisters Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster are embarking on their first major exhibition together; Remember, Somewhere – a series of captivating paintings which invites the viewer to examine the crossovers and contrasts between the two prolific artists’ work.

Hailing from the North East, the sisters share a studio together in Ouseburn. They each have a distinctive, fascinating painting process that explores the breakdown of imagery by recreating them in paint. Chronicling each other’s work, Laura noted: “I would describe Rachel’s work as layered, luminous, intriguing,” and in return Rachel offered: “Laura’s work is process led, intuitive and expressive.”

Delving into their individual practices, Laura relayed her fondness of anonymous, analogue photography and how it informs her work. “The images I use were created at a time when people were more selective about the moments they chose to record as there was a finite amount of shots on the camera film,” she continued: “This lends the images a pathos and sense of coming from the flow of life which I’m drawn to.” Laura carefully wipes away paint in a more spontaneous manner, explaining her process as “very much about action and reaction.”

In juxtaposition, Rachel describes her process as a lot slower by “building up lots of thin layers of paint over time to build up a surface of marks.” Rachel sources imagery from overlooked 80s and 90s films, citing VHS tapes as inspiration which she absorbed growing up. “I deliberately choose imagery which you can’t pin down to a specific film as I like the imagery to be ambiguous/open.”

Despite the sisters’ magnificent, distinct styles, Remember, Somewhere is a conversation; a dialogue between them, and the bringing together of the two artist’s paintings displayed side by side, divulging into the interlaps of their work. The work feels alive, there’s a sense of flow and movement, delicately communicated through careful brush strokes, bold colours and use of light. Laura remarks: “We wanted the work to develop naturally and come out of our ideas about painting’s physicality, its ability to break down and remake an image.” Rachel added: “Both of our practices are concerned with ideas around paint as paint, and paint as illusion – and the playful relationship between them.”

It’s an intriguing notion to ‘rescue’ an image – whether it be forgotten memories on photographs or overlooked filmic imagery that moves between “clarity and blurriness of memory”; the sisters present the imagery as new to a viewer through their unique lens.

On the grandness of their first exhibition together, they both conveyed an excitement to have their work seen by Baltic’s wide audiences. I invited the painters to share any advice they would offer to young artists or anyone who’d like to work in the industry, and Laura expressed: “Don’t wait for ideal conditions to make work – find a way to keep working as best as you can on whatever scale works for

 you to keep pushing your ideas.” Rachel suggested: “Be adaptable and open minded. Let your ideas take you where you need to go and follow them. Great quality documentation of your work is key!”

Remember, Somewhere is an unmissable chance to experience the outstanding art by two immensely talented artists and siblings. The exhibition runs at Baltic, Gateshead from Saturday 12th April- Sunday 12th October.

NARC. Interview: Laura and Rachel Lancaster – Remember, Somewhere 8 April 2025 Mack Sproates

Interview: Laura and Rachel Lancaster – Remember, Somewhere 

James Cabaniuk employs strategies of queer opacity and abstraction to construct gleefully layered large-scale abstract oil paintings, installations, and site-specific projects that embody concepts of fun, camp, sexuality, gender, self-destruction, and healing, seeking to liberate personal trauma from shame, and exploring queer identity and history. 

The singularity and machismo of 20th Century Abstract Expressionist painting become, in Cabaniuk’s assured hands, a world wherein they navigate their complex relationship to the power it embodies – simultaneously fetishizing and critiquing it. 

James lives and works between Manchester and London. They were interviewed by London-based curator Leo Babsky.

Soooooo before we start talking about art ….. I actually really want you to talk me through your wedding-day lewks cos they were amazing. 

Thank you! That is all down to my friends Stephen Doherty and Craig Lawrence. They are both incredible artists and designers, and wanted to make sure I could feel FAB! as it’s quite hard to find really glamorous clothes if you’re 6’3 and a size 18. The first two looks were actually meant to be as one for a reveal on the aisle, but I read the email confirmation wrong, and we all arrived 45 minutes late for the ceremony and barely had time to get shoved in one. 

Where did you grow up, and how was your childhood/adolescence as a queer person? 

I grew up in a small town on the edge of the Lake District. Drop dead gorgeous countryside but limiting as a young person, especially one who was a raging queen. There were lots of fab women who were quite camp in that really northern way in my town who, like most little fem boys, I gravitated to, so it wasn’t lonely. Outside of this, as a queer person it was a bit bleak and rough at times which is probably where I developed a healthy dose of delusion. 

Growing up, art felt like the gay boy version of football where you could leave your stifling little town and be really glam and live the fantasy. So, naturally, I ran to London at 18. 

Your practice feels almost archeological, literally plowing through paint or metaphorically excavating facets of queer history such as cruising, glory holes, or, more recently, queer subculture in the late 1800s or early 1900s. How do you approach and research these historical aspects of LGBTQIA+ history? 

I’ve always seen the making of the paintings as creating a record of queer and personal histories and placing it within a specific time in art history and trojan horse-ing that agenda. There is a parallel for me between the cultural history of queerness, the personal histories of experience/trauma/healing (and, at points, loads of self-sabotage obvs), and the idea of personal growth through excavating these things. Part of the use of the abstraction is to keep these coded languages in some way private. I don’t want to translate everything to a viewer who it might not be for. The best response I ever had to work was this 60-something queen wandered past my painting, clocked the yellow hanky, turned to me, gave a little wink and a grin, then slunk out of the room. 

Love that. Following the above, can you tell me a bit more about your exhibition, In Holes and Corners, which was held at the Italian Garden, Great Ambrook in Devon?

So I learned of the Italian Garden, Great Ambrook, a private walled garden created as a gay oasis by its owner, Arthur Smith Graham, in 1909, after having a gorgeous evening watching Gardeners’ World. The article showed the garden, which is stunning, and spoke of Arthur’s sexuality and reasons for building the garden. There was a talk on queer Edwardian gardeners the following Friday, so I went down and met Kate Hext, who had organized the series of talks, who then wrote the incredible text for the show. 

Graham had to live a life in the closet due to the cultural and legal limits set by the time, and it is believed he built the garden as a private refuge to relax and gather his gay confidants openly in a beautiful place of privacy. Graham requested that all of his documents, photos, and diaries be burned when he died, which means there aren’t any records of what happened in there, and I wanted the possibilities of what happened to be held in the light and be able to be seen outside of those walls. 

The garden was designed by the architect Thomas Henry Lyon, also a noted homosexual, and was built in the Italianatestyle and features a swimming pool, plunge pool, tennis court and summer house. It is like an open-air Chariots (* gay sauna in London). It lay forgotten for decades before being discovered and gently restored by the current owners. 

I went to the garden and collected soil which I then mixed with pigment in the colors associated with queer culture at the time and glitter and sieved it onto the surface of the paintings. One of the opening questions I asked Kate was what color would most strongly define this, and she sent me an image of the first issue of a publication called The Yellow Book. It was an exact match to Grindr Yellow, and the characters on the cover were wearing black masks. These historical references were framed blatantly alongside the recurring themes in my work.

As visitors took a turn around the garden, they were given a scroll written by Kate that set the scene of queer culture in the late 1800s/early 1900s. There was also a sound piece recorded by Georgie Wells of queer pop songs performed as siren songs that played from the Dell in the center of the garden. 

There are still issues with some visitors to the garden today not wanting to hear about its gay context. Fortunately, Steph, one of the owners, is really open to championing queer projects and was supportive of both my work and not setting conditions that got in the way of telling the story of Arthur’s queerness. 

Your paintings always make me laugh (in a good way) as they seem such a piss take/ subversion of that macho cliche of the lame, cis-het male “auteur“ artist throwing paint onto the canvas in a poor imitation of gestural abstraction/ abstract expressionism and I know you enjoy playing with those tropes. Would you like to expand on that for me? 

Oh, I’m glad you think they are funny. This might be a really unhealthy coping strategy, but even when talking about big or heavy subjects, there is usually some humor in there. I guess it’s about laughing instead of feeling shame about it all. The history of big, ab-ex painting is a bit like hetero-masculinity, it’s quite sexy, and I definitely fetishized it in a way that was detrimental for a while, but I don’t respect it for what it represents to me as a queer person. I find it fun to be sarcastic and critical inside it. With the scale, there is something about altering spaces with the work and what it’s trying to say that I enjoy. They turn into props for the content as they get bigger and move into something more spatial.

What future projects are you looking forward to? 

I am showing some work with Workplace at Nada Miami, which is fab because I imagine it’s like the Bird Cage, and I have a solo at the gallery in the spring of next year. Also, topping up my Botox. 

Crush Fanzine front cover of an article interviewing James Cabaniuk. Image shows one of his large scale paintings surrounded by grass and trees

CRUSHfanzine

James Cabaniuk Interview

‘Remember, Somewhere’ is a remarkable exhibition at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art that brings together the work of twin sisters Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster.

What do we speak of when we speak of a life? Look around you. Is it your house, your possessions? Is it your friends? Your partner? Is it those skinny jeans you’re wearing that don’t quite go with the rest of the gear you’ve got on? No. A life is your memories: your recollection of what happened to you this morning; your recollection of what happened to you yesterday – all the way back to your very first memories. These memories are often unreliable. Often fragmentary. Often mutable. But – ultimately – they are all we have, so we cling to them. And there’s a real sense of that – of reaching out and trying to grasp something that went before – in the paintings of both Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster, despite the fact that their styles are entirely different.

Laura Lancaster’s work stems from found imagery that she’s collected from anonymous analogue photographs and film. In short: the forgotten flotsam and jetsam of other people’s lives. And by rendering them onto canvas through a bewilderingly expressive style of painting, she brings these snapshots to life; but, crucially, the figures she depicts – mostly women – are not identifiable. This ensures that her work slips into a nebulous and collective consciousness that produces in viewers a sense of yearning. These memories could be ours: messy, and, rather strangely I think, both simultaneously happy and melancholy. Her influences are said to include the likes of Bacon and DeKooning, but some of her brushstrokes remind me of the work of the great Spanish impressionist

Joaquín Sorolla. Such fluidity! Such luminosity!

Laura Lancaster operates in a liminal arena, both otherworldly and enigmatic, and it’s a place that her sister Rachel Lancaster also enjoys exploring, albeit in a completely different manner. In fact, Rachel Lancaster’s paintings are the polar opposite of her sister’s (that’s her ‘Nights That Followed’ pictured). They are exact, precise, and don’t depict scenes as such, but extreme close-ups. The back of someone’s head. A hand. But, crucially, they also have the kind of narrative drive that someone like Cindy Sherman managed to imbue her celebrated ‘Untitled Film Stills’ series with. Just like our memories, Rachel Lancaster’s pieces are fractured and suggestive of something half-remembered, half-forgotten. And because of the way they are painted

– successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint applied to the canvas to build up an image over time – they also have a curiously fetishistic quality. But that feels apt to me, because isn’t it true that there’s nothing we enjoy more than fetishising our memories, often to the point where they become dreamlike – which brings us right back to these incredible paintings. An utterly unmissable show. RM

Remember, Somewhere: Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster, 12 April-12 October, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. baltic.art

The Crack. The persistence of memory 2025

The persistence of memory 

I think the gallery should tell everybody that Jacob Dahlgren (@jacob_dahlgren) shipped his soup can sculpture as a single giant piece that had to be corkscrewed through the door in a convoluted process similar to the “Pivot!” couch scene from Friends. It’s not true, but fits perfectly with the silly-serious nature of his work, which includes abstract stripey sculptures made from plastic hangers, and thirteen years of standing in the same pose for a daily photo, now sequenced into a 5 minute video loop. This show is a great reminder of the hidden charms to be found in the everyday.

‘When Anxieties Become Form’ at Workplace (@_workplace_) until 28 Sept

London Art Roundup

Review: Jacob Dahlgren: When Anxieties Become Form   

‘LAURA LANCASTER'S 'IN DREAMS' AT WORKPLACE GALLERY’ 12 June 2024

Lancaster does not aspire to issue neat conclusions: rather, she has approached In Dreams with an openness towards a ceaseless diversity of interpretations. Her paintings act as vehicles that transport her audience into dreamlike worlds; it then becomes the responsibility of the viewer to develop the rest of the plot. writes Lara Alake.

Dreams are mysteriously vivid yet always fleeting. Their content drifts through a series of dualities in which the quotidian exists alongside the otherworldly and the abstract merges with the exact. Such tensions are explored by painter Laura Lancaster within her solo exhibition at Workplace Gallery, In Dreams. Lancaster pushes the formal boundaries of oil painting to imbue her new body of work with pictorial illusion; these paintings of anonymous figures set against natural landscapes invite viewers into what feels like a hazy daydream.

The largest paintings dominate the walls upon entering Workplace. Four figures relax at the foot of a craggy coastline cliff in Visitors (2024). Contrastingly, across the room, Recalled (2024) captures a candid moment between two girls in matching smock dresses wrapping their arms around one another as they precariously sit on top of a sea boulder. The faces of all the figures are enticingly blurred, their bodies enveloped by their surroundings. I peered and squinted at these paintings to distinguish limbs from pebbles and, in doing so, I fell further into the scenes of bygone eras. It was as though these images lived deep within my subconscious and I was casting my mind back to grasp these memories.

Lancaster’s romantic depictions of a not-so-distant past are developed from black and white photographs found in flea markets, online auctions and junk shops. Through digital manipulation and colourisation, these monochromatic vintage images have been vibrantly translated onto Lancaster's canvases. Her uncurbed but considered swipes and drips of paint add elements of dynamism and energy into the exhibited artworks, treading the fine line bordering whimsy and the uncanny. In Dreams breathes new life into discarded, forgotten and archival keepsakes.

Along with this comes a palpable sense of intimacy that reverberates throughout the exhibition. Lancaster implicates her audience as voyeurs of private moments belonging to her anonymous subjects. On the lower ground floor, the painting To Be Waiting (2024) captures the sight of a young girl taking pause to glance at her reflection whilst in a rowing boat. She is completely oblivious to our prying eyes. We note her vulnerability as she revels in her serenity. We shouldn’t be staring; we know that we shouldn’t be staring. Yet, this somewhat perverse feeling is washed over by the thrill of remaining covert. Well, that is until the voyeur realises that they too are being watched.

When walking through the exhibition, it becomes apparent that some of Lancaster’s subjects have taken notice of their captive audience. The aptly named Sightings (2024) poignantly captures the moment a woman begins to flee after discovering a spy hidden amongst the nearby overgrowth. Elsewhere, a gaggle of girls glance back at an unwanted spectator who has rudely disturbed their conversation in Woods (2024). By breaking the fourth wall, the audience has been unmasked as the snoop in the bushes and the unwelcome visitor in the forest. As the figures in Lancaster’s paintings stare back, we can no longer feign ignorance in relation to the result of our voyeuristic tendencies. Suddenly, these quaint paintings of candid scenes are tinged with unease: the dream has come to an abrupt end.

Lancaster does not aspire to issue neat conclusions in the exhibition. Rather, she has approached In Dreams with an openness towards a ceaseless diversity of interpretations. Her paintings act as vehicles that transport her audience into dreamlike worlds; it then becomes the responsibility of the viewer to develop the rest of the plot. Yet, these charming moments are transient as Lancaster matches the ephemeral nature of dreams through her use of perspective. As we come around from our daze, we are left longing for the beauty we once found in dreams.

Lara Alake is a London-based writer and arts professional.

Fetch London ‘LAURA LANCASTER'S 'IN DREAMS' AT WORKPLACE GALLERY’ 12 June 2024 Lara Alake

Fetch

LAURA LANCASTER'S 'IN DREAMS' AT WORKPLACE GALLERY

Laura Lancaster: My Echo, My Shadow 16th March, 2024 – 30th June, 2024 NGCA Main Gallery

Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art c/o National Glass Centre

My Echo, My Shadow is the largest solo show to date of British painter Laura Lancaster. Presenting new paintings and drawings made over the last few years My Echo, My Shadow delves into the current practice of one of the North East’s most celebrated and accomplished painters.

The source of Lancaster’s paintings and drawings are found photographs, slides and cine films of strangers, purchased from online auction sites, flea markets and junk shops. She translates these lost and discarded memories into paintings which sit ambiguously between abstraction and figuration.

The highly gestural, visceral and expressive application of paint allows the everyday and mundane to become surreal, grotesque and poignantly melancholic. Challenging the formal language of painting and photography Lancaster probes the reliability of the photograph as a record or snapshot replacing representation with nostalgia, the familiar with the dreamlike, and lived experience with collective consciousness.

Confronting a gendered history of painting, Lancaster draws upon numerous styles and genres as well as touching on the history of painting as a medium. The artist paints women in classical poses, be it in front of mirrors, in lush green landscapes or in moments of rest. However, these motifs, reimagined by Lancaster, avoid a simple passive

reading, instead they allude to confinement, vulnerability and control.

Guided in the direction of abstraction the paintings refrain from the voyeurism historically associated with female figures within the conventions of traditional painting. Lancaster’s painting process starts with drawing. The drawings aim not to copy the photos she finds but rather to encapsulate the feeling that she gets when she looks at them. From each drawing, she makes a painting, and then from that painting, another painting, and so on. My Echo, My

Shadow includes a selection of these drawings placing Lancaster’s paintings in context and illuminating the full breath of her practice.

Jon Weston, Curator of Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art says ‘We are delighted to host the largest show of Laura’s incredible paintings and drawings to date. Over recent years Laura has been pushing the boundaries of her practice and producing work which delves into the history of painting readdressing the position of the female figure. This marks the perfect time to focus on Laura’s recent work. We look forward to welcoming visitors from across Laura’s home region of the Northeast and further afield, internationally, to experience her work.’

Laura Lancaster: My Echo, My Shadow opens on the 16th of March, 2024 until the 30th of June, 2024 Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art

Art Plugged ‘Laura Lancaster: My Echo My Shadow 9 June 2024

Laura Lancaster: My Echo My Shadow

Nowadays, gentleness can often be mistaken for passivity. Yet, Aristotle once described the quality as “justified and controlled anger,” suggesting that gentleness has not always been conceived as such. This evolution marked the inspiration behind “Gentle Again,” a group exhibition at The Shophouse gallery that brought together an array of canvases, a video work, and kinetic installations to re-examine the titular concept. The works were crafted by eight artists who hail from diverse cultural backgrounds, including Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Ireland, the UK, and Romania. 

On the ground floor of The Shophouse’s three-story historical building in Tai Hang, Norway-based Hong Kong artist Yu Shuk Pui Bobby’s video work Genetic Salon—Waiting Room (2021) was immediately visible on a TV screen. It depicts five different stories of what occurs in a waiting room prior to a genetic modification procedure, and in each, a receptionist delivers a monolog, weaving a speculative story or dialog based on the potential outcomes of genetic modification. Emphasized by the eerie atmosphere of a clinically white empty room, the surreal conversations ridicule overtly standardized, bureaucratic procedures imposed by biotech companies that exploit and perpetuate people’s quest for perfection. Perhaps an offshoot of the exhibition’s theme, Genetic Salon resembles a visual novel, where tension between the viewer’s experience and the actresses’ monologs creates a strange, yet elusive intimacy. Yu further emphasizes that dichotomy by exaggerating the personal desire for body modification to absurd lengths. 

The feeling of elusiveness was reiterated by Hong Kong artist Tung Wing Hong’s kinetic moving luggage, A Way (Away) (2023), wandering around the ground floor. The work vaguely questions the absurdity behind migration, tourism, and the peripatetic lifestyle of globetrotters like celebrities, digital nomads, and global art professionals. Tung’s other kinetic sculpture, his large-scale installation T(hey) (2024), also employs symbolism. Two robotic arms appeared on the carpet, rotating as a motor-driven curtain surrounded them; the limbs maneuvered unhurriedly and sometimes caressed one another. The moving curtain followed, gently altering the space and sometimes blocking the view of the arms. When observed closely, one may realize that both limbs are of left arms, suggesting that they were torn off from two different models. The limbs’ slow movement and random collisions could thus be interpreted as two separate persons caught between avoidance and yearning for intimacy. 

The exhibition also presented a wide range of paintings. Irish artist Ciarán Murphy’s Kind of blueish (2021), which depicts three canoodling lovebirds on two cupped hands against a deep brown background, captures an innocent human-animal relationship and evokes a sense of warmth and tenderness. Robin Megannity’s PICA (2022) illustrates a cube of ice bitten by teeth; a portion of the linen is left blank, exuding an acute sensation from a quotidian moment of tension. The Romanian artist Paul Robas’s painting For a minute there (2024) features a photorealistic chandelier juxtaposed against the malformed face of a boy looking annoyed. Painted under a rose-tainted hue, Robas highlights the illusionary nature of his subjects. Lastly, Taiwanese artist Huang Ko Wei’s diptych Apollo & Artemis (2024) vividly captures glimpses of passengers in a metro station, accentuated by the contrast between the platform’s sharp infrastructure and its blurry movement. The rusty red and blue colored lighting sporadically permeates the paintings, casting different temperatures within the busy commute space to symbolize passersbys’ alienated distance. 

A curatorial statement suggested that “the moment before,” or the time prior to any conclusions can be drawn, lays the foundation for gentleness to emerge. This was evident through the artworks’ emphasis on the feeling of almost, on the in-between, on elusiveness, wherein confusion and dichotomy breed intimacy. Broaching these concepts within the urban sanctuary of The Shophouse, the exhibition provided a gentle respite in an otherwise harsh world. 

Alex Yiu is associate editor at ArtAsiaPacific. 

ARTASIAPACIFIC ‘Gentle Again at the Shophouse’ 27 May 2024 Alex Yiu

ArtAsiaPacific

‘Gentle Again at the Shophouse’

One of the region’s most celebrated and accomplished painters has her largest solo show to date at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art (NGCA) next month.

Laura Lancaster’s My Echo, My Shadow exhibition is at NGCA’s Main Gallery in the National Glass Centre from March 16 to June 30, presenting new work made over the last few years.

Laura, who was born in Hartlepool, finds inspiration from photographs, slides and cine films of strangers, bought from online auction sites, flea markets and junk shops.

  Laura Lancaster, Shaking Through by Laura Lancaster 2023. Courtesy the artist and Workplace, UK. Photo by Tom Carter.

Laura’s painting process starts with drawing. The drawings aim not to copy the photos, but to capture the feeling that she gets when looking at them. From each drawing she makes a painting, then from that painting, another painting and so on.

Laura’s free My Echo, My Shadow exhibition includes a selection of these drawings, placing her paintings in context and illuminating the full breath of her current practice.

Laura graduated with a degree in fine art from Northumbria University and has exhibited work across the UK and around the world, including shows in South Korea and the USA.

 Dreamer by Laura Lancaster 2023. Courtesy the artist and Workplace, UK. Photo by Tom Carter.

“This marks the perfect time to focus on Laura’s recent work. We look forward to welcoming visitors from across Laura’s home region of the North East and further afield, internationally, to experience her work.”

For more information, visit the NGCA website.

Sunderland Echo ‘Leading North East artist’s Sunderland exhibition’ 12 February 2024 Tony Gillan

 ‘Leading North East artist’s Sunderland exhibition’  

The Crack Magazine ‘Fleeting Moments’ 1 December 2023

Rachel Lancaster’s stop-you-in-your-tracks paintings capture those strange moments you generally view out of the corner of your eye. You can see her new show at Workplace gallery in Newcastle.

A red balloon obscures a child’s face. An inelegantly wrapped parcel (cerise coloured paper) lies on a table. Someone (a man or woman – we can’t see their face) wears an Aran jumper. These are the kind of scenes that are of great interest to Rachel Lancaster, which she depicts in her stunning oil paintings. She grabs these ‘stills’ from found moving imagery, alongside an archive of her own photographs, in a way that feels fresh, surprising and cinematic, with the seemingly mundane becoming weighted with a narrative significance. Lancaster – a recipient of the Ares Mosaic Art Prize and BEEP Painting Prize – was born in Hartelpool and now lives and works in Newcastle. She has exhibited widely and taken part in numerous projects, performances and artist residencies both nationally and internationally. Last year she joined Workplace and this exhibition marks her first solo show for the gallery. RM

Rachel Lancaster: In The Wake, 25 November-10 January, Workplace, Newcastle, workplacegallery.co.uk

The Crack

Fleeting Moments

Honest and moving stories of imprisonment are set across two films that cover the lives of historic prisoners told through song and contemporary prisoners recounting tales through digital avatars that are all birds of prey. Given we’ve all been through lockdown this is what true containment is like and comparatively we’ve had it easy. Until 28 May.

FAD Magazine -The Top 6 Art Exhibitions To See In London in Late May

The Top 6 Art Exhibitions To See In London in Late May

Artlover Magazine ‘Jacob Dahlgren’  1 September 2019 By David Castenfors 

‘Jacob Dahlgren’ 

Magic in what you see Sharon Mizota, Los Angeles

If you’ve ever wielded a paintbrush in the service of art, you’ll appreciate the fluidity and deftness of Laura Lancaster’s brushwork. The British artist, in her first L.A. solo exhibition at Night Gallery, makes big, lush paintings that teeter between figuration and abstraction.

Her subjects are classic — women, paired with mirrors or water — but the results feel more like Abstract Expressionism, or perhaps a more extreme form of Impressionism. Whichever “-ism” you prefer, the works are moving meditations on the vicissitudes of vision, memory and time.

The works begin as photographs, from which Lancaster makes pastel drawings. The final paintings are created from the pastels, representing two stages of abstraction. If a photo is a snapshot of a moment, these paintings are like an echo: a memory faintly recalled.

” is a grayscale painting that at first looks wholly abstract, but eventually it resolves into the barest suggestion of a ponytailed woman, seated before a milky vanity. Searching for this figure amid Lancaster’s broad, confident brushstrokes is something like a Rorschach test. The gradual revelation feels magical.

” are slightly more distinct: two pale-skinned bodies floating in the water. Their contours are nothing but broad smears of paint, but somehow Lancaster man- ages to coax a sense of presence and specificity from the tangle.

” is even more impressive. Amid looping, drippy strokes of pale blue, ochre, orange and white over a dark ground, we’re surprised by the barest suggestion of a black face emerging from the tumult. It’s marvelous how Lancaster creates such a startling pres- ence — once seen, you can’t unsee it — with such economy of means.

I was reminded of Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell, whose loose, energetic brush- work conjured rapturous landscapes. L.A. artist Mary Weatherford also comes to mind, attuned as she is to the poetics of place. Lancaster applies this atmospheric approach to the figure, an effort that might also be compared to the awkward ballerinas of Edgar Degas: body parts emerging from a flurry of tutus.

The experience of searching, and the pleasure of finding, are delicious. The work evokes memory: the way a thought or image is recalled from the stream of experience, to crystallize, if only for a moment.

Magic in what you see Sharon Mizota, Los Angeles Times May 19, 2019

Los Angeles Times

Magic in what you see

Yxta Murray, Contemporary Art Review. LA May 8, 2019

You don’t have to be a woman who’s terrified of the future to appreciate Laura Lancaster’s paintings, but it helps. Her pastel-colored canvases, wherein she uses water-based pigments to create frantic, disarticulating landscapes and portraits of disappearing women, evoke erasures of all kinds. Her work invokes death, aging, the fading of memory, and even the falseness of social roles.

In Lancaster’s solo show, Running Towards Nothing, this spectre of erosion and loss dawns slowly. Initially, the work appears to dole out untroubled pleasures. In Reappear (2019) an Anglo lady gazes at herself in a vanity; she’s molded out of messy salmon-brown strokes that indicate ringlets and plump shoulders. But Reappear is no Jane Austen homage: the subject’s face soon melts away and her arms deteriorate into blood-like drippings, while Lancaster’s lavish use of white to blur the painting’s surface hints at the dissolving of this life into the next. Spectre (2019) also first strikes the viewer as a cheerful image of a girl in dishabille, but the subject’s head softens into brown smears as she applies lipstick, so that her left eye looks like an abyss. And in Ghost (2019), a departing girl merges with a whitened mirror like something out of The Matrix. In Lancaster’s mirror motif women vanish as they try to see and transform themselves, creating a complicated argument against nature and patriarchy’s preferences for youth and obedience.

Other images show bodies splintering during storms whose winds blow away existential landmarks, such as place and time. In Afterglow (2019), a dark-skinned figure in a feathered hat submerges in a pool of multihued confetti, as if she is descending into a cosmic version of a McDonald’s ball pit. In Nowhere (2019), Lancaster floats a genderless suggestion of a person (with a red howling mouth) in a cataract of sherbet swirls.

The lovely pink, green, and opaline tones of Lancaster’s palette offer her hard truths as if in a delicious layer of fondant; her strategy recalls how some women shore themselves up against catastrophe by leaning on accepted brands of femininity. Lancaster performs a subtle critique of femme culture by merging prettiness with harbingers of getting older, perishing, and buckling under aphasia. Her art creates a gendered memento mori, reminding us of how the certainties we rely on the most (from delimited social identities to family) cannot protect us against havoc, because they are either built on lies, or just can’t last.

Laura Lancaster: Running Towards Nothing runs from April 25–May 26, 2019 at Night Gallery (2276 E. 16th St., Los Angeles, CA 90021).

Laura Lancaster at Night Gallery Yxta Murray, Contemporary Art Review. LA May 8, 2019

Contemporary Art Review LA

Laura Lancaster at Night Gallery 

When we met we talked about the almost regal look of some of the characters in your paintings, you mentioned that some of them we're actually a form of self portrait. Can you explain on your interest in painting this figure?

It is an interesting observation but, the characters are not intended to be regal. Some figures are indeed self portraits and some are of other people. I like that viewers can gain different perspectives from my paintings. It’s one of the reasons I love to paint.

Some have said that characters in my paintings like ‘Shallow Water Swimmer’ look as though they are wearing court dress wigs. I dyed my hair once, it was not successful and looked as though I had gone grey at a young age. Curiously at the same time I thought, I must have the most common hair colour in the world, as most people, across all races will one day turn grey. It wasn’t my intention and I have never thought about this seriously, but I suppose since then I have spontaneously used a greyish colour a lot when painting hair. I often draw human figures including myself, but try to realise images on my canvas without too much information and identity. Perhaps my use of greyish paint for hair is a useful tool to disguise identity.

Smoke/Smoking is also a recurring theme, could you talk more about that?

I like to use forms of smoke, drizzle and haze. The mist of a person’s breath on a cold day which looks like an empty speech bubble. These are ‘non-special’, momentary events that disappear. I often compare them with memories. Brutal and sad events as well as happy and mundane ones start as a very raw feeling but eventually fade to something more gentle and distant.

I wonder with the plants and leaves in your work are they from a specific place. They have a tropical feel, but with the regal looking characters I get the sense we could be at Kew Gardens in the 1800s?

I live close to Greenwich Park in South East London and walk through the park each day to get to my studio. As I walk the plants and the trees have become part of the ‘ordinary’ landscape in which I now live. I have a fern, banana and date palm in my garden as well as some other more tropical plants for which I don’t know the names. I also draw less formal planting, the little anonymous weed growing in the top of a wall. I combine unrelated past memories with current ‘non-special’ places on my canvas. These are the images that naturally re-occur in my paintings.

You're originally from Korea, is there anything about the application of paint that you feel is Korean, or influenced by your background. or the other way round is there anything about your work that might seem European to a Korean artist, given your education in the UK?

I do not consciously try to paint in either a ‘Korean’ or ‘European’ style, however there have of course been influences from both my time here in the UK and when I first started painting in Korea. I learned calligraphy for some years when I was a teenager in Korea and sometimes I notice subtle similarities to calligraphy in the way I use the brush.

I have been here in the UK almost 10 years now, and I feel the environment, colours and my life here as a foreigner, now influences my work more than my time on my MA at Chelsea. Some of my friends in Korea have said my painting has changed since I moved to the UK. I think the images and colours that I apply to the canvas have been influenced from my physical surroundings and so now seem foreign to them in some way.

TRADE 

Laura Lancaster makes seductive paintings from found snapshots, showing people and places she does not know. The anonymous figures in these works are rendered even more obscure by the welter of brushstrokes that cover them like swaths of bandages, through which only glimpses of eyes and mouths can be seen. Dracula, 2014, shows what appears to be a young boy, perhaps wearing a mask, standing in front of thick foliage. Another figure in Untitled, 2014, is plastered in white marks, like a fattened version of the Invisible Man. The subjects of her paintings are adrift, their identities irrevocably lost, allowing Lancaster to bury them in the act of painting. Her skill in doing so gives her work fascination and value as it takes on a baroque lusciousness that contrasts with the oftentimes monstrous and generally perplexing subject matter.

Lancaster’s earlier paintings from 2001 are photographic in appearance and small in size and resemble oil sketch studies. The larger canvases of her latest paintings have allowed a great deal more freedom with effect—the broad strokes and drips of the painting Contact, 2014, for example, suggest the unguarded carelessness of the photographic source. One thinks of the photo-paintings of Gerhard Richter, particularly his townscape paintings, but the result is more the model of painterly autonomy provided by Georg Baselitz. (Lancaster’s surfaces look a little like Baselitz’s recent homage paintings to de Kooning.) The harshness of her subject matter, derived from the unguarded snapshots that she uses as source material, suggests a more distant connection with Expressionism, above all to the late works of Lovis Corinth, with their wild yet unerringly accurate stabs of paint.

A series of paintings made in 2013, “Conversations Behind Glass,” took photographs of gravestones as source images. The artist has also copied inscriptions on the back of the photographs, often pathetic in sentiment and with poor grammar. Beneath the vivid, luscious structures of paint marks there is a feeling for human frailty, an empathetic sensibility that reaches further into the act of painting than Lancaster has before.

Artforum

Laura Lancaster

Miami, Day 4: Claire Sherman, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Joel Kyack and More 

Miami, Day 4: Claire Sherman, Enrique Martínez Celaya, Joel Kyack and More  Mary Addison Hackett, Nashville Scene December 11, 2013

‘Humour Holds Dahlgren’s Objects Together’ 

Svenska Dagbladet ‘Humour Holds Dahlgren’s Objects Together’  21 November 2013 By Hakan Nilsson  

 ‘Humour Holds Dahlgren’s Objects Together’  

Andréhn-Schiptjenko is pleased to present Jacob Dahlgren’s second solo show at the gallery.

Dahlgren constantly seeks geometric and abstract patterns in the surrounding world. He regards himself and his striped t-shirts – that he has worn for the last thirteen years and plans to wear the rest of his life – as a living exhibition. The starting point for the new video work, Neoconcrete Space, is his collection, now consisting of 1027 t-shirts.

In the film Non Object, Dahlgren follows and films people wearing striped shirts without their knowledge. Through filming individuals from the same distance and placing them in the same central location in the image, the artist reduces the person to an abstract motif.

The exhibition also consists of the performance piece Neoconcrete Ballad, a large-scale abstract painting, created on site by different coloured and sized wall plugs. The painting will be created during the length of the exhibition. A few hours every day, people will be hidden behind a wall in the gallery, drilling holes into which they will place plugs. Those drilling the holes decide the final result, but they have to follow certain rules set up by the artist. As a spectator on the other side of the wall, you only see the activity as drills and plugs coming out of the wall, gradually forming a pattern.

Neoconcrete Ballad relates to earlier work such as I, the world, things, life in , Signes d’abstraction at the mall Gallerian in Stockholm and many others of Dahlgren’s installations where the interplay between time, space and spectators plays an important role for the work.

Mousse Magazine article about Jacob Dahlgren. Image on front shows a close up detail of an artwork by Dahlgren made out of pencils

Mousse Magazine

Jacob Dahlgren: “Painting into Space and the Meaning of Construction” at Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm  

A YEAR which saw Laura Lancaster enjoy her first solo exhibition, has won the artist a consecutive Culture Award in this category. She was given the Visual Artist of the Year award for her work throughout 2009, and the judges felt she deserved it once again, following her a diverse sequence of solo and group exhibitions, which graced the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle, the DLI Gallery in Durham, Transition Gallery in London and Gallery North Newcastle, during 2010 and early 2011.

The Laing exhibition featured new watercolour and oil works, used via a range of media including installation, collage and charcoal drawing.

While her DL exhibition drew on photographs, slides and cine films of strangers - found in flea markets, junk shops etc for inspiration, translating

them into drawings, paintings and installations.

"I'm very happy to be shortlisted again, it's great to have such recognition. I have been really busy recently, with three solo exhibitions in the last few months! It's a great way to work through ideas, and get a response to my work. In terms of highlights, I'd have to say the solo exhibition at the Laing Museum and Art Gallery, which was my first major solo museum show in the UK. It was a great space to show my work in!'

The Culture Awards - WINNER: Laura Lancaster

The Journal

The Journal - Culture Awards 2008

Katerina Seda shows two strong works at Modern Art Oxford and

these fulfil two roles: by themselves they constitute the latest in a

series of exhibitions entitled 'Arrivals>New Art From The EU'

and simultaneously they ground the group show upstairs,

Both of Seda's works are documented interventions. The first,

There is Nothing There, 2003, involved orchestrating a day in

which all the inhabitants of Ponetovice, a village in the Czech

Republic, coincided in their routine activities. They all swept the

pavement in front of their houses at roam, for instance, lunched

on dumplings with tomato sauce at noon and turned their lights

out at 1opm. There is a great volume of paperwork presented - a

manifesto and charts detailing the devising of the project, numer-

ous posters and letters documenting its implementation - and

the video of the event itself, including feedback from the partici-

pants, appears at the end on a small monitor. Nothing is held

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