Exhibition
Laura Lancaster: My Echo, My Shadow
16 Feb 2024 – 30 Jun 2024
Regular hours
- Friday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Saturday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Sunday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Monday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Tuesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Wednesday
- 10:00 – 17:00
- Thursday
- 10:00 – 17:00
Free admission
Address
- at National Glass Centre
- Liberty Way
- Sunderland
Tyne & Wear - SR6 0GL
- United Kingdom
Travel Information
- St Peter's Metro Station
- Sunderland Station
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.
About
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 the 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, familiar with 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.