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

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

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

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