The Encroacher, 2007

Liane Lang (b. 1973)

RA Collection: Art

The Encroacher is one of the Casts series of photographs made by Liane Lang whilst in her final year at the Royal Academy Schools. In a statement about the work, Lang describes the series as an attempt to consider the traditional plaster cast from a contemporary point of view. Using re-configurations, which draw out the cast's qualities of gesture and sensuality, the artist aims to animate them away from their academic confines.

In Casts, Lang animated various plaster casts from the RA Collection with seemingly living figures which are, in fact, latex casts. The artist states that The Encroacher 'plays with different registers of figuration, the wax work, the plaster cast from life, the cast from death and the arrangement of a figure to suggest action and agency where none exist. The model for the figure in the cleaning/fetish gloves was fellow RA student Annabelle Moreau. The work ironises the sexualisation of women in the arts and the RA ...at the time, the fluidity of assigned roles and the complexity of images. The work also enquires into the subject of the figure in sculpture per se, its function and ambiguous use. This is a subject I deal with in all my work.'

Quotes taken from an unpublished interview with the artist, 2017.