Elysium Gallery invites you to the latest of our series of online artist talks.
Topic: Rachel Lancaster Artist talk
Time: Aug 27, 2024 7:00 PM Wales
For Rachel Lancaster, painting slows down the act of looking; it invites the gaze to linger upon the otherwise overlooked. With a focus on the intersections of painting with cinema, photography and music, Lancaster edits and translates photographic ‘stills’ into oil paintings, drawing on found moving imagery, her own photographs, and drawings rendered directly from her imagination.
Although her style is contemporary, Lancaster is indebted to the painterly tradition of still life, and in particular vanitas works – symbolic still life’s that communicate earthly transience and the inevitability of death. She depicts detailed fragments divorced from greater narratives, rendering those fragments both descriptive and abstract, ambiguous and open-ended – the close-up texture of fabric, for example, or an unlabelled parcel, uncannily illuminated, playfully enigmatic. She reveals the uncanny beauty and quiet spectacle that lies beyond the action.
The paintings are made by applying successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint, allowing many layers of colour and texture to accrue over time. Slipping between definition and abstraction, her surfaces contain an array of optical effects. Often, anticipated details give way to looser, minimal rendering that is revealed as a painterly abstraction upon closer inspection. The artist carefully considers subtle decisions about cropping the source material, and through an open ended, intuitive process, evokes a narrative that is full of mystery and intrigue. Careful attention to multiple scales – life size, close up, zoom, at a distance – establish distinct modes of viewing, placing the viewer in different vantage points, on the floor, at eye level, looking down upon the subject. The eerie scenes are as if they are within their own temporality, either stuck in the past or in a limbo state. Reflections, colours and action point beyond the canvas, suggestive of what else is happening outside the image, lurking out of sight. Lancasters work references the dreamlike sense of otherness found, in particular, in cinema, reimagining this upon the canvas.
Rachel Lancaster (b.1979, Hartlepool, UK) lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. She completed her MFA in Fine Art at Newcastle University and her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University. She has exhibited widely and taken part in numerous projects, performances and artist residencies both nationally and internationally. She has been included in group exhibitions at The Auxiliary, Middlesbrough, UK; Elysium Gallery, Swansea, Wales, UK; Art Spot Korin, Kyoto, Japan and Venice, Italy; Royal Academy, London, UK; Rye Art Gallery, Kent, UK; Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield, UK; Baltic 39, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK; and Shophouse, Hong Kong.
Lancaster is the recipient of Ares Mosaic Art Prize, BEEP Painting Prize, and was shortlisted for the Contemporary British Painting Prize. She was Artist-in-Residence at Alewive Brook Road in New York, the former residence and studio of Elaine De Kooning. Her work is held in multiple private collections.
Lancaster is represented by Workplace gallery and is an invited member of Contemporary British Painting.