Abigail Lane

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Abigail Lane ,Born in 1967, studied at Bristol Polytechnic and later at Goldsmiths College, London. Lane co-curated the pivotal Freeze exhibition in 1988, with fellow graduates Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume, which is credited as the start of the YBA movement in the 1990s. Her first solo exhibition was held at Karston Schubert, London in 1997 and she has also exhibited extensively worldwide. Lane’s unsettling images betray her long-standing fascination with turn-of-the-century phenomena such as freak shows, circus and magic acts. Lane creates a ’funhouse-mirror reflection’of the life of the mind.

Her work is based on late Victorian displays such as séances, circus imagery and magic shows. It has included wallpaper with a repeated design of images of her rear, scratching and scraping noises heard behind a shut door and wax replicas of bodily fragments suspended from the ceiling.

Since 1996 she has lived and worked in a 6,000 sq ft warehouse in a Hackney wick industrial estate.

In October 2003, with Bob Pain and Brigitte Stepputtis, she launched a design company called "Showroom Dummies". Work has included cushions, blankets, uniforms and wall coverings. She asked artists to adapt plastic skulls. Sarah Lucas cast one in concrete; Peter Blake covered one with the endings of books. She had a relationship with fellow YBA, Michael Landy, and is friends with Tracey Emin, who said, “Abigail could show the contents of her fridge and it would be fantastic. Everything she does has an artistic quality to it, whether she's cooking a meal or arranging a shelf. She can do anything from interior design to styling to making art; her problem, if anything, is that she's too good at too many things.”

Tomorrow’s World, Yesterday’s Fever (Mental Guest Incorporated) is Abigail Lane’s first solo exhibition in a public gallery in the UK since 1995 and perhaps the most ambitious single showcase of her work to happen anywhere since that date. The exhibition consists of three large-scale installations, initially conceived as companion pieces and showing together for the first time. Conjuring a beguiling, theatrical mood from their mix of disparate elements (old-style music hall posters, looping film projections and set-piece sculptural items), The Figment, The Inspirator and The Inclination continue a fascination with the fantastical and the uncanny that has long been a feature of the artist’s work. Abigail Lane is well known for her large-scale ink-pads, her wallpaper made with body prints, her wax casts of bodily functions, as well as a number of unsettling and ambiguous installations in which the human body is simultaneously present and absent. In these earlier pieces, Lane emphasised the physical marking of the body, as traces or as evidence. For this project, she turns inward to explore the mysteries and vagaries of the psyche; yet finds a means of embodying some of the phantom presences that lurk there that is as immediate, graphic and compelling as any of those earlier

There is a deathly sense of impending tragedy in 25 Watt Moon, a photolithograph image derived from her film of the same name. Moths repeatedly encircle the weak light bulb, colliding with it in their delicate excitement; the seductive light which is finally of no use to them and is likely to accelerate their deaths. The low wattage implies low life, and the setting is ambiguous: is this a cheap hotel, tenement or charnel house? In the context of Lane's previous works, this scene takes on the identity of aftermath, evidence of an event as much as portents of things to come. For her 1995 installation Bloody Wallpaper, she used the image of marks made by a murder victim with their own blood, in the last desperate flailing's or an attempt at communication, as the repeated pattern on wallpaper. Actions leave evidence, and many of her works have built fragile narratives upon traces, a note here, a print there.

Abigail Lane's work from the early nineties often described an absent presence, the traces that people leave behind and questioned issues of mark making through a series of pieces that included giant wall mounted ink pads, ink pad chairs, wallpaper imprinted with body parts and the seminal Conspiracy from 1992. In this, Lane supplied a series of rubber stamps of her own finger prints which players use to implicate her in a crime and it is for her to find an alibi at any given time. The shoes bearing Ann Elliott's¹ footprints can be worn/used by anyone to implicate her as well. Parallels are therefore drawn between art making and the perpetration of a crime - the gesture or imprint of the artist can be seen as a transgressing act which opens itself to the interpretation and analysis of the viewer.

Conspiracy, is a kind of game, albeit a serious one. In two identical black boxes, identical letters challenge players to fabricate evidence of a crime. Included are official-looking police forms for fingerprint documentation and a set of rubber stamps bearing individual fingerprints. Of all the works shown at Schubert, Conspiracy had the most serious overtones. Since the fingerprint is a pivotal piece of evidence in solving crime, it has acquired a social significance far surpassing any other form of body print. This work, in which Lane deepens her investigation of the traces that we make, was the most provocative in the exhibition.

Nevertheless, the other works also sharpen our awareness of the ways that, throughout life, we leave behind traces of our existence. Lane causes us to consider how our traces might be reconstructed, how our story could be told, and how truth may or may not be revealed by the different kinds of marks we make.

The fascination of terror is an element in the work of Abigail Lane. In April 1995 she papered the walls of the ICA in London with wallpaper with a design in English red. Only on taking a second look did it become apparent that the design was made up of photographs. They document blood trails which homicide victims left during their short, brutally forced transit from life to death. Although the bodies are invisible, the residues of blood in connection with the knowledge of the 'deadly' circumstances establish a strange resonance, a collective presence of the murdered. It is not the aestheticisation of violence or a sensation-seeking voyeurism that are the matised here, although these issues may be conjured up in the background. Lane pursues a continuous interest in the nature of trace. The aesthetic investigation in The Incident Room (1993) is centred around the significant and the arbitrary trace, too, but from a different perspective. The pale body of a nude woman is partly buried in soil. The scenario could have been taken from the front page of a tabloid paper. Only the de-contextualisation in the realm of the aesthetic elevates the situation and strips it of its deflating familiarity.

Artist Abigail Lane lives and works from a converted warehouse on an industrial estate in Hackney Wick, East London, from where she runs her interiors company Showroom Dummies.

I never really see my place as a flat. Although it is homey, it is very much a workspace too. What I love most about it is the scale. In my previous flats, I only had to lunge for things - here I get the chance to take a walk from one side to another. I love the "big sky" feeling, being high up with so many huge windows.

There are more than 27 windows and I don't have any curtains apart from in my bedroom, where I have blackout blinds. I didn't want the feeling of being hemmed in by curtains, plus they would cost a fortune.

Before I moved to here, I had a place in Shoreditch in which I could both live and work, and where my love affair with big spaces began. It completely changed the way I lived my life. I was there for six years, before the area had anything.

I held some great parties there: two followed the Turner Prize, one for Sam [Taylor-Wood] and one for Gary [Hume].

However the area soon changed, rents started to rise and more and more artists had to leave . When I realised that I would have to move, I decided to walk east along the canal until something turned up. Eventually I stumbled along across a wasteland of largely redundant buildings. As it turned out there were already a few pioneers living there and leading an alternative, "halfway house" sort of existence. Now, I love the fact that this space is so close to the river.The building was formerly a factory for Burberry, and my kitchen was their canteen, so there were many things to be moved.

My interior style is quite grand but homely, eclectic - and not at all flashy.

I had a gut-feeling about the corner I would like to sleep in, so that immediately became my bedroom. Since I started the furniture design company, Showroom Dummies, with Brigitte Stepputtis, who also works as the head of couture for Vivienne Westwood, and Bob Pain, a print specialist, the house is even more full of furniture. My place is our showroom and the heart of its creativity.

Abigail-lane-5-Watt-Moon-Young-British-Artists-or-YBAs-also-Brit-artists

Young British Artists or YBAs also Brit artists and Britart a group of conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists derived from the Sensation Saatchi Gallery Exhibition.

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Firstly, in what eBay categories might contemporary, fine art oil paintings be found? The seller could reasonably place such a painting in any of the following categories:
* Art:Paintings:Modern (1900-1979)
* Art:Contemporary Paintings:

Other Contemporary Paintings
* Art:Contemporary Paintings:

Traditional
* Art:Artists (Self-Representing):

Paintings:Oil
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Unfortunately, only the last of these categories is specific to oil paintings so we need to search within those categories. Let's try a simple search within each category for the word "oil" in the item title only. This gives us the following item totals example-
* 2,228 - Art:Paintings:Modern (1900-1979)
* 204 - Art:Contemporary Paintings Other Contemporary Paintings
* 732 - Art:Contemporary Paintings Traditional
* 1,252 - Art:Artists Self-Representing Paintings Oil
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There are also some steps we can take to reduce this number further, but some hard decisions are required. Firstly, we could look at items in the UK only. Overseas shipping can be very expensive, redress may be more difficult, and many paintings sourced in the far east may only be painted once you have placed your order. A UK only search for oil, reduces the number to about 2,000.
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Unfortunately, some real world galleries do sometimes put unsold stock on to e-bay and these can be good bargains, so we cannot always dismiss business sellers. One approach is to exclude particular sellers, for example just two e-bay UK stores account for over 1,500 paintings.

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In short, there is no easy way to identify good, fine art original oils, but some of the following ideas might help:
* Search for "oil" in the listing titles of each of the categories above as often as you can; order the list by "time-ending soonest" and work through as far as you can.
* Modify your search to exclude the e-bay stores that do not stock the kind of art you are looking for.
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