Beautiful Brutalism (National Theatre VIII) Photograph - Limited Edition of 15

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 before becoming an artist. Since November 2018 she 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 in Brutalist Architecture and Modernist Housing Estates. Recent work from these endeavours was exhibited at The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2019, Ashurst Emerging Artist Exhibition 2019 and The London Festival of Architecture 2020. Amelia’s work has also been shown at The Proud Gallery and The Courtauld Institute East Wing Biennial and this year at The Bhavan and Open Eye Galleries. In 2019 Amelia was commissioned by Brent Council to take a series of portraits to celebrate the lives of Brent council tenants for The Addison Act Centenary commemorating 100 years of council homes and the start of social housing. These were exhibited at the Brent Civic Centre with The Chartered Institute of Housing. In 2019 she was invited by FUBUNATION to collaborate on an exhibition at the Roundhouse fusing movement and imagery. This work was later shown at Velorose in partnership with The Whitechapel Gallery’s First Thursdays. Amelia’s Southbank work transforms architecture through spatial abstraction. Contrast and colours are manipulated to accentuate shapes and structure, creating ambiguous spaces and new concrete compositions. Colour is used to flatten the image and negative space is also sometimes explored to locate latent configurations beyond the human eye. 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.