Abigail Lane born 1967

English sculptor and installation artist. She studied at Bristol Polytechnic (1985–6) and Goldsmiths College, London (1986–9). She had her first solo exhibition, Abigail Lane: Making History, at Karsten Schubert, London, in 1992. Lane's work of the early 1990s dealt with the presentation of bodily traces as forensic evidence. For her installation Bottom Wallpaper (exh. Lucerne, Ksthalle, 1992) she papered the gallery walls with a repeating pattern of female bottom-prints, the space also containing a chair whose seat had been converted into a large blue ink-pad. Wallpaper was used again in the exhibition Skin of the Teeth (London, ICA, 1995), this time with a motif of bloody hand-prints and drips, based on a police photograph of a murder scene. The space contained other objects, such as a Jack Russell terrier petrified in cement and cast body parts hanging from the ceiling, forming an unsettling and highly suggestive scene. The uncanny (unheimlich) forms a strong theme of her work, particularly in Misfit (1994; London, Saatchi Gal.) a lifesized wax-work man dressed only in a bomber jacket, reclining as if drunk, pathetically vulnerable, on the floor. The figure was based on a person Lane had seen on the streets of London, her re-creation allowing us to scrutinise and speculate upon an otherwise unpleasant scene. In the late 1990s Lane produced a series of digitally enhanced colour photographs of domestic interiors, with images of wild animals in their natural habitats viewable through window and door frames.

Bibliography
Abigail Lane (exh. cat., essays R. Shone and I. Blazwick, London, ICA, 1995)
Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection (exh. cat. by N. Rosenthal and others, London, RA, 1997)

JOHN-PAUL STONARD
10 December 2000