‘Remember, Somewhere’ is a remarkable exhibition at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art that brings together the work of twin sisters Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster.

What do we speak of when we speak of a life? Look around you. Is it your house, your possessions? Is it your friends? Your partner? Is it those skinny jeans you’re wearing that don’t quite go with the rest of the gear you’ve got on? No. A life is your memories: your recollection of what happened to you this morning; your recollection of what happened to you yesterday – all the way back to your very first memories. These memories are often unreliable. Often fragmentary. Often mutable. But – ultimately – they are all we have, so we cling to them. And there’s a real sense of that – of reaching out and trying to grasp something that went before – in the paintings of both Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster, despite the fact that their styles are entirely different.

Laura Lancaster’s work stems from found imagery that she’s collected from anonymous analogue photographs and film. In short: the forgotten flotsam and jetsam of other people’s lives. And by rendering them onto canvas through a bewilderingly expressive style of painting, she brings these snapshots to life; but, crucially, the figures she depicts – mostly women – are not identifiable. This ensures that her work slips into a nebulous and collective consciousness that produces in viewers a sense of yearning. These memories could be ours: messy, and, rather strangely I think, both simultaneously happy and melancholy. Her influences are said to include the likes of Bacon and DeKooning, but some of her brushstrokes remind me of the work of the great Spanish impressionist

Joaquín Sorolla. Such fluidity! Such luminosity!

Laura Lancaster operates in a liminal arena, both otherworldly and enigmatic, and it’s a place that her sister Rachel Lancaster also enjoys exploring, albeit in a completely different manner. In fact, Rachel Lancaster’s paintings are the polar opposite of her sister’s (that’s her ‘Nights That Followed’ pictured). They are exact, precise, and don’t depict scenes as such, but extreme close-ups. The back of someone’s head. A hand. But, crucially, they also have the kind of narrative drive that someone like Cindy Sherman managed to imbue her celebrated ‘Untitled Film Stills’ series with. Just like our memories, Rachel Lancaster’s pieces are fractured and suggestive of something half-remembered, half-forgotten. And because of the way they are painted

– successive thin glazes of translucent oil paint applied to the canvas to build up an image over time – they also have a curiously fetishistic quality. But that feels apt to me, because isn’t it true that there’s nothing we enjoy more than fetishising our memories, often to the point where they become dreamlike – which brings us right back to these incredible paintings. An utterly unmissable show. RM

Remember, Somewhere: Laura Lancaster and Rachel Lancaster, 12 April-12 October, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. baltic.art