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 the North East of England, after each has been on a whirlwind tour exhibiting all across the globe.
Painter sisters, different styles
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 recognisable 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.”
Long Time Listener, 2025
Laura Lancaster
WORKPLACE
Finding their own style
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.
A major moment
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.
Closer, 2025
Rachel Lancaster
WORKPLACE
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.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/8vJ9pSk
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