Rachel Lancaster’s practice involves isolating and reproducing digital stills from film and television programmes. Investigating seemingly unimportant, potentially overlooked, in-between moments she excludes specific, identifying details such as
recognisable human actors or iconic locations. The process of selection, cropping and sequencing creates ambiguous images and foregrounds the aesthetic quality of represented scenes. Yet, in spite of being cut off from their original films, the images still have the potential to suggest stories. They call up familiar filmic narratives or conversely suggest new associations with their unexpected juxtapositions.
For Morphic Resonance Lancaster has also experimented with sound editing. Using found/ sampled sounds from the television she has edited out dialogue leaving the background sounds that give films tone or atmosphere, but remain largely incidental.
Responding to the project title, Lancaster selected images and sounds loosely concerning nature and collective behaviour: for example swarms or crowds. She notes how the universality of filmic and tele-visual languages, and their potential for shard communication, gives these media an affinity with Sheldrake’s notion of morphic resonance. However, rather than accepting wholesale the capacity of these media to communicate shared meanings, Lancaster questions and subverts the codes that enable us to make sense.
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Left to right: Rachel Lancaster ‘Ring’, ‘Aquarium’ and ‘Bees’, inkjet prints on paper, each print measures 130 x 91.5cm, 2009; ‘Birds’, digital recording, 2009
Photograph: Pippa Hale
Rachel at work in the space at PSL
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