NADA New York 2023

Laura Lancaster’s paintings are drawn from found imagery, collected from anonymous analogue photographs and film. She transposes the lost and discarded memories of strangers into an ambiguous territory between abstraction and figuration, shifting between the sentimental and the grotesque. Confronting a gendered history of painting, Lancaster draws on a range of influences, including Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lovis Corinth and James Ensor. Subverting notions of authorial autonomy, her work becomes a conduit through which the lives of the lost and nameless are connected with our own.

‘The Drift’, a work of acrylic on linen, is concerned with liminality and blurring states. Lancaster’s painting style, slipping boldly between the abstract and the figurative, echoes the supine subject’s own state of consciousness, caught ambiguously between sleeping and waking. The colour palette, freed from the confines of realism, reaffirms this. The result is a laconic dreaminess, rendered in brushstrokes; sinking into her environment, the woman starts to blend with it, echoed by the free merging of colours and forms, escaping compositional boundaries: her selfhood, it seems, is fragile in the hands of sleep.