Laura Lancaster makes paintings and drawings from photos, sometimes choosing to replicate the whole of someone else’s family album, creating individual works that might consist of 200 separate paintings. There are individual pieces as well, swift copies of snaps bought at junk shops and charity shops, or discovered in the street. and each has been chosen because they have been found. Her appropriation of images seems almost accidental.
Lancaster saves the treasured moments that have become lost in time and in her own words Woods is interested in the ‘’slippages and blips in our routine existence… phenomena and occurrences that go unnoticed, easily passed by or quickly forgotten.’’
In her film Distant Things (2006) Katy Woods animates micro film by standing a video camera in front of the monitor and speedily flicking through thousands of images. She then pauses for a few seconds resting on an image she likes the look of. Woods has an eye for a satisfying image. She loves a bird. Images of birds are paused at frequently. In a world saturated with visual images How does one make a choice? Ones own intuition seems as successful as any.
With both artists acknowledgment of their use of the subjective Laura and Katy’s work seems immediately appropriate for each other. Both embrace a series of systems that give order and purpose to aesthetic and philosophical ideas that see a method in subjectivity.
This is the first exhibition in a continuing series of shows bringing together work by two artists.
Laura Lancaster was born in Hartlepool, UK in 1979. 2001 BA (Hons) Fine Art, Northumbria University. She Lives and works in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK.
Katy Woods born 1975. Studied Fine Art in Bristol and Sheffield. Lives and works in Sheffield.
