Acclaimed artists and twin sisters Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster – who live and work in the North East – will present the first major institutional showing of their work together at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art from Saturday 12 April.
Remember, Somewhere will feature new and existing work by the prolific painters, created in the studio the artists share in the Ouseburn Valley – just a mile from Baltic.
Laura Lancaster said: “We’ve shared a studio together in the Ouseburn, not far from Baltic for over 12 years now, and hope that the visitors in the exhibition will feel involved in this conversation between our two artistic practices and the conversations and exchange of ideas which was happening during the making of these paintings.
“This opportunity has allowed us to scale up our work and present the largest two-person exhibition of mine and Rachel’s work so far. As artists who grew up in and live in the North East of England it feels significant to present our work to this audience.”
Rachel Lancaster said: “I am excited to be showing my work with Laura at Baltic for our first duo exhibition in a museum setting. The support from Baltic has facilitated the production of a new body of (mostly) large scale works especially for the show – the largest I have made in over 15 years. The process of making these paintings has provided a great opportunity to delve deeper into themes and ideas within my work. It has promoted a vibrant conversation about the connections between my practice and Laura’s and I look forward to sharing this with the large and diverse audience of Baltic visitors. As an artist born and based in the North East it means a great deal to show my work in region.”
Though identical twins, Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster have both developed distinct strategies for making work which at first glance appear visually opposite. Whilst Laura Lancaster works with a loose and gestural ‘wet on wet’ technique of painting that explores the tension between figuration and abstraction, Rachel Lancaster creates tightly controlled luminescent images with rich colour and depth built through thinly layered glazes of oil paint.
Laura Lancaster, who completed her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University, makes paintings from found imagery, collected from anonymous analogue photographs and film.
Shifting between the sentimental and the grotesque, Lancaster’s paintings are uncanny and strange, dreamlike visions from a shared consciousness.
Confronting a gendered history of painting, Lancaster draws upon a range of influences including the work of Francis Bacon, Willem DeKooning, Lovis Corinth, and James Ensor. Lancaster subverts the notion of authorial autonomy, allowing her work to become a conduit through which the lives of the lost and the nameless are connected with our own.
Rachel Lancaster, who completed her MFA in Fine Art at Newcastle University and her BA in Fine Art at Northumbria University, focuses on painting and its interactions with the languages of cinema, music and photography.
Photographic ‘stills’ from found moving imagery, alongside an archive of her own photographs are selected from, edited and then translated into oil paintings.
Lancaster’s paintings represent detailed fragments of a greater narrative. She is drawn to seemingly insignificant passing shots, extreme close ups of inanimate objects, common place domestic interiors; the split-second moments that are “in-between” the action. Divorced physically from their position within a narrative structure, these paintings become abstract, ambiguous and open ended as to the unknown events which have preceded or may follow.
This exhibition explores the points of contact between the two artists which stem from a shared interest in the found image as the origin of their work: Laura through collecting discarded analogue photographs from second hand markets and online, and Rachel by taking her own photographs of B movies and cult cinema.
Intimacy, ambiguity and presence, are central to both artists, and the subject is focussed upon the solitary female – either dissolving into landscape in Laura’s case – or close cropped and in relation to specific items of jewellery or fabric in Rachel’s work. In both practices the fleeting and incidental are monumentalised, and monumentality itself is explored from a feminist perspective, through the means of a collective and collaborative authorship in dialogue with found and dislocated imagery.
Remember, Somewhere will explore the relationship between the artists and their practice and will include newly commissioned works and loans from the Government Art Collection and various private collections.
Remember, Somewhere will be on show from 12 April – 12 October 2025.
Both artists are represented by WORKPLACE.