The walk from Newcastle train station to the Baltic was a balmy meander by the River Tyne laced with foaming cherry blossom and a chorus of gulls. It was my first visit to this former flour mill, but was a familiar space to the artists I was there to interview. After 25 years of admiring the artworks in the gallery, the Lancaster twins Laura and Rachel were now placing their canvases on the whitely glowing gallery walls. 

Remember, Somewhere is their first exhibition at the Baltic and their first institutional show together. Their canvases display two completely different styles – Rachel’s pieces feature softly lambent moments while Laura’s swirling scenes flicker with movement. But in the space, the Hartlepool-born sisters have created a luminous balance between their work. It is a carefully-orchestrated dynamic.

“The first thing we thought of was how we could match scale wise so that our voices were the same volume in the room,” Rachel explains. “Laura’s [paintings] are a bit more loose and mine are a bit more tight, but for this we both narrowed down the range of subject matters so that there was a feeling of consistency.” 

Their shared focus goes beyond the female figures that pulse often across their canvases. “We’re both quite concerned with colour and light, so we talked about luminosity and feeling the canvases emanating light,” says Laura. “Even though they’re different styles, we were thinking about how the paintings are so large that you can get a distance from them and see them as a coherent image, but then you get up close, they breakdown in slightly different ways. I think we’re both interested in that point when the paint becomes paint and isn’t descriptive.”

Stepping between paintings and moments, you feel that subtle shift from image to pigment. At the entrance of the gallery, the ridges of a golden jumper emerge from Notes Lie Long, up close they diffuse into a mesh of tones. 

There are also similarities in their processes – both artists start from still images that they find and transform between the discovery and the final work. Laura uses found photographs imbued with the poignance that comes from a time when photographs were singular and expensive, while Rachel finds her images by photographing frames in underground films from the 80s and 90s, injecting her work with a cinematic everydayness.

“We both manipulate the image more than it might seem that we do,” says Laura. “Some of mine are actually from black and white photographs, some are from colour photographs, and some are from 35-mm slides. Long Time Listener was a black and white image that I’ve colourised digitally.” Laura’s works emerge quickly. Moving between buckets of oil paint, she responds to the image and the canvas bringing some elements forward and removing others. As part of this process, Laura explores how the edges of tones meet each other allowing for fragmentation and interaction between the figures and their surroundings and letting ambiguity swallow their expressions. She explains: “I’m not trying to make it look exactly like the photograph, I’m trying to feel the presence of the person that was in the photograph coming through.” 

For her 15 canvases on show, Rachel took hundreds of photographs frame by frame, before narrowing down to single images which she tested as charcoal drawings before being selected and committed to canvas.

“It’s a way for me to find images without them being identifiable as a simple film, because that open-endedness is very important to us both. I try to make the charcoal drawings the same size as the painting is going to be. That’s a way for me to start to break down the images and see what the most interesting bits are and what I can leave out.”

Carefully cropped and adjusted, she builds up her paintings through a laboriously planned process of increasingly opaque layers of oil paint and no white paint. “I think it gives them a really particular sense of light and a back-lit, screen-like feel,” says Rachel. “For Sitting Still, the white areas are where I’ve wiped back to the canvas.” 

Both artists title their work from fragments of writing they collect in the quotidian, an approach they applied to the title of this show and one that also hints at the ideas tugging at their work.

“It’s from a song lyric, but it also felt like it resonated with how the paintings relate to memory,” Laura explains. “Obviously mine are landscapes and Rachel’s are specific locations, but ambiguous. It’s the idea of how memory and place interrelate with each other and how that relates to painting.”

Rachel continues: “Memory is one of the ideas that our work revolves around and keeps going back to. The remember part is how we start images, collective memory and how you store images in your head…the somewhere part was resonant because when you look at the painting you’re transported somewhere else and then you come back again.”

By Rowan Twine

Main image: Laura Lancaster & Rachel Lancaster, Remember, Somewhere, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. © 2025 Baltic. Photo: Reece Straw.

 

Remember, Somewhere is at the Baltic in Gateshead until October 12, 2025. For more information, click here.