"Remainder is part of an ongoing series of paintings based upon found images of women in landscapes. In these images there is a sense of confrontation with the viewer, with the viewer meeting the gaze of the subject whose face is peering through the paint. My work has become increasingly concerned with this silent exchange between the viewer and the subject.

These works have been made during national lockdown in a home studio which has resulted in more smaller scale work. This work has a focus on gesture, intimacy and the way in which this smaller scale can be used to create different atmospheres. The paintings are made in three or four rapidly executed layers, painted onto coloured grounds, which is a conscious effort to add a sense of luminosity and light emanating from the canvas.

There is a focus on the feeling of temporality, of paused movement in a liminal space. These subjects are at some point on a journey, suspended in a tangle of marks and painterly gestures. The marks displace the subject, doing away with any sense of specifics of their exact location, giving them the feeling of a dream or memory. These everyday images take on a new meaning or reading when painted in this way.
These figures are singular, isolated yet also in vast space, which perhaps is linked to them being made during lockdown, the sense of the suspension of reality, and of life being on pause. An exploration of landscape and sense of space, which is also contained within a modestly scaled canvas.

In “Remainder” we see the rendering of the border of the source photograph which is a device I often use to explore the idea of containment, what is contained within the rectangle, what spills over the edges, it gives a sense of pressure as if the painting is struggling to be contained."

Laura Lancaster, 2020