Artist Talks; Laura Lancaster

Laura Lancaster (1979) is a British born contemporary painter who makes work from a large range of different photographs often found at markets or bought on ebay, Lancaster's painting are a blur of abstraction and figuraition. For an exhibition at the Priestman Gallery, sculptor Eric Bainbridge selected various pieces of Lancaster's work that all dealt with found imagery, these included work made from family photographs. This interested me as one of the main sources of imagery I used as a painter was family photographs, for a previous body of work I focused solely on old, often forgotten, photographs of family members and how the image becomes a memory over time. This correlates with Lancaster's interest in found imagery and photographs as a basis for work. Her work reminds me of the work of Frank Auerbach. Lancaster also explores scale through her work and how the size can change the power of the piece.