Lana Locke has gone leaps and bounds in her education… from self-taught artist to practice based PhD at our CCW Graduate School. Here is a collection of images from Lana Locke’s installations at the opening of her show at the ICA Bloomberg Contemporaries 2103 and at Chelsea College last week.
She illuminates us with her Biography:
“I am an artist working with found and natural objects, cast metal and photography. I was self-taught until my Postgraduate Diploma at Chelsea College of Arts in 2010, ahead of the 2011/12 MA in Fine Art. My first public sculpture was installed at the main entrance to Harefield Hospital, Middlesex, in December 2010, sharing ground with work by Antony Gormley and Grayson Perry. My sculpture for the smoking terrace of the Ivy Club in London, was mentioned in the Evening Standard’s 2011 list of Sexiest places in London… for illicit liaisons. Previous commissions included work for Nicolas Roeg’s film, Puffball, in 2006. This year, I was featured as One to Watch in The Independent, following my selection for Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2013 (on show at the ICA from November 2013 until January 2014) and winning of the Selector’s Prize in the Creekside Open 2013 exhibition selected by Paul Noble. In September 2013 I commenced a practice-based MPhil/PhD in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, supported by Chelsea Arts Club Trust and am talking on a panel at the ICA on Friday 6 December about Practice-based PhDs: http://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/friday-salon-practice-based-phds
I have also just been granted funding from the Research Degrees’ Student Initiative Fund at Chelsea College of Arts to put on a public event called Passport to Pimlico in Spring 2014.”
And develops our understanding of her practice through her artist statement:
“I am interested in setting up antagonistic and creative relationships between objects and the spaces in which they are installed, and in the so-called ‘feral’ nature of human beings, against the constraints of contemporary society. My work explores themes of mortality, procreation, abjection and transgression, seeking to make connections between human biology and natural and manmade structures; packaging and waste. Objects, appropriated like props for my sculptural forms and photographs, are abstracted and made strange through visibly fragile compositions, often referencing the internal and external human body.
Over the course of the last year, my work has expanded towards installation-based work that carries the visual language of my objects and images into the architectural environment, involving and temporarily altering the space to become part of the surreal and abject world of the work. The space becomes a large living collage for my working processes, as much of a sculpture as the objects and images within it.
My current research centres on how the antagonistic qualities of an object/installation can be mobilised as an antidote to the reductive forces that the installation space itself is subject to. Most immediately, in the current climate, against the commercialism and austerity politics that would reduce the arts and public institutions alike to the common denominator of “the business model”, where even an unsellable art installation must be commodified as having a marketing value. This interest has extended to using objects and texts in installation interventions in outside spaces, particularly contentious commercial spaces, including a recent project protesting a local London pub being turned into a Tesco supermarket.”
Definitely one to watch now and in the future!