Lancaster was born in 1942 in Bega in south-coast New South Wales. After studying at the National Art School in Sydney during the 1960s, she exhibited paintings and travelled overseas before becoming dissatisfied with the Modernism of the time. Attracted by the crafts revival, she felt it could offer her an alternative means of artistic expression, and she found her way to enamelling. 

By the late ‘70s/early ‘80s Lancaster had a studio and sales gallery in Sydney’s renowned Argyle Arts Centre in The Rocks and was selling her work to both Australians and international visitors, some of whom became return clients. A number of her works were bought for significant public and private collections, including that of Government House, ACT. 

In addition to making and exhibiting her enamelled works, Lancaster served on the Craft Council of New South Wales for five years and was an Exhibitions Officer. She also taught art and was involved in community arts projects. In 1977 she was awarded a grant by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Lancaster’s enamels were distinguished by their high quality of design and execution and the artist’s willingness to experiment, for instance with extremely high temperature firing. She favoured strong, deep colours, her frequent use of blues deriving from her spirituality and the environment. Some of her multi-coloured cloisonné work was reminiscent of stained glass. In her surface designs she favoured simple shapes such as a circle or cross; these too had spiritual and environmental resonances for her. For example, Lancaster told me the abstracted design on the lid of the cigar box in CAM represented a grove of tea trees with a moon above. 
 

Zen Buddhism was important to Lancaster at that time while later in life, she said, she did not adhere to a specific faith or spiritual practice but felt what most mattered was oneness with the environment.

After finding enamelling was harming her health, Lancaster returned to painting during the ‘80s. In the early 1990s she and Dick Turner settled in Central Victoria and she began exhibiting her paintings in group shows in the region. In 1998 she had a solo show at CAM, ‘Bloodlines the Coliban’.  Victoria’s Coliban River was seen as a universal symbol of life, its channels providing conduits for refreshment and purification as veins and arteries do for the body. Images included cascades and pools of water. 

CAM's collection includes a selection of Jan Lancaster’s enamelled objects made around 1980: a goblet, a tile, a sugar bowl, a set of three bowls, and two boxes (made by master woodworker Alan Wale OAM) with enamelled panels attached. There are also two works on paper by Lancaster in CAM’s collection, one an oil, the other mixed media.  

Lancaster has been praised for capturing the essence of an entire environment in a few brush strokes, to quote George Milford, a long time trustee of CAM.