Reduction (The National Theatre I)

Windows I, II & III (Gloucester House)

Amelia Lancaster originally trained as an architect and set designer before becoming an artist and photographer. She won a National Set Design Competition to work at the BBC and worked as an Art Director on Channel 4 for a contemporary Opera. Her debut solo exhibition has just opened at The National Theatre’s Wolfsun Gallery.

Since November 2018 Amelia has been Artist in Residence for the London Borough of Brent on The South Kilburn Housing Estate. She is documenting the urban transformation of the area during an extensive period of regeneration through exclusive access to all the empty blocks, demolition, and construction sites. This combines her interests of Brutalist Architecture and Modernist Housing Estates. Recent work from these endeavours has been exhibited in The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition and The London Festival of Architecture.

Amelia was also commissioned by Brent Council to take a series of portraits to celebrate the lives of Brent council tenants for The Addison Act Centenary Exhibition commemorating 100 years of council homes and the start of social housing.

Since 2003 Amelia has been photographing The National Theatre and surrounding Southbank. Her work transforms the architecture through spatial abstraction. Contrast and colours are manipulated to accentuate shapes and structure, creating new concrete compositions. Colour is used to flatten the image and negative space is also explored.

Where her Southbank series places a strong emphasis on form, and is consciously non-figurative, her regeneration work examines the interface between architecture and its inhabitants with particular reference to the South Kilburn Estate.