Artist: Rachel Lancaster

Workplace presents Notes Lie Long, a solo exhibition by Rachel Lancaster. Featuring a series of new paintings, the exhibition explores the poetic instability of memory, presence, and the everyday - held together just long enough to capture the fleeting resonance of moments that are at once intimate and elusive.

In this new body of work, Lancaster continues her idiosyncratic investigation into the emotive and conceptual potential of painting. Her subjects, cropped, close, and seemingly familiar, hover on the edge of recognition. A glimpse of blonde hair casually tied with a green band; the tangible soft texture of a mohair jumper; the potential touch of two hands meeting. These images drawn from film stills from the 1980s and 90s act as emotional triggers; vehicles for sensation, recollection, and narrative that resist fixed interpretation.

As Lancaster explains, “the more you try to pin the image down, the more it dissolves”. This slippage is both formal and psychological. From a distance the works appear almost photographic in their realism, yet up close their fixed quality gives way to a dynamic and highly painterly surface. Their luminous appearance is reminiscent of the backlit glow of a screen from which the images originate. This hazy glow is achieved with the absence of any white paint. Lancaster delicately wipes away the gossamer layers of oil paint to expose the white of the primed canvas creating an internal radiance, as if light emanates from within the painting rather than reflecting off its surface.

The exhibition title, Notes Lie Long, speaks to Lancaster’s deep connection to music and cinema, in particular the emotionally ambiguous spaces crafted by composer Angelo Badalamenti and haunting dream-logic of filmmakers such as David Lynch and Federico Fellini. Lancaster’s paintings act as both object and experience; a chord held mid-air – emotionally charged, resonant, and filled with atmospheric tension.

There’s a cinematic rhythm to the exhibition but without a fixed narrative. Painted with clarity yet resisting total legibility, Lancaster’s works carry a quiet power. Nostalgic and uncanny, recognisable yet rendered in an ephemeral and heightened register. Whether depicting a fleeting gesture, light passing through wisps of hair, or a fragment of light on a cheek, each painting suspends the viewer in a moment of ambiguity, an echo of something once felt, and invites not a passive viewing but an active participation.