Interviews with Artists
Alana Lake
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Interview by Dawn Woolley
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Published in April 2026
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Dawn and I met about 20 years ago, one of us about to enrol at the RA and the other at the RCA. We lived together for a time, navigating a difficult flatmate, the social awkwardness of me having recommended him, and some truly astronomical heating bills. All these years later, our paths cross again - this time through the Yorkshire Sculpture International mentoring programme. Here we are, reflecting on my exhibition Wanting Yearning at Haarlem Artspace, curated by Kristain Day.
Let’s jump straight in. The subjects of your artwork are quite serious but there is a wry humour that runs through it - I think it is part due to your transformations of material from immaterial into solid - but also the everyday nature of your subject (e.g. graffiti) and materials (e.g. concrete / plastic plant). Could you describe how you develop these ideas? Do you start with an object and think about the way you want to recreate it?
It’s a difficult question to answer because it changes all the time. I don’t have a single method or way of working, and sometimes I wish I did - it might make things simpler. But ideas, or “thoughts” as Phillida Barlow liked to call them, can take years to develop into something fully formed for me. There’s a slow maturation. Thoughts mutate, shift, and pass through different material stages. One of the recurring anchors in my practice is photography. I don’t always think of it consciously, but I have a large archive of photographs I take almost daily. Through that process - the repetition and compulsion of returning to certain subjects - I often arrive at an idea or object to work from. During the PhD, I think the structure of the programme and the need to articulate what I’m making has made the work more intentional, but even then things still change. Ring of Fire (2024), for example, started life as a chandelier before becoming a daredevil stunt hoop.
Ring of Fire, 2024. 220 x 200 x 60 cm. Steel, glass, silicone. Image by Will SlaterMany of the works sit within an ongoing series called Pleasure Drive, which I began in 2018 when I returned to sculpture. It’s a deliberate play on Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), where he outlines the tension between the life and death drives. A lot of my work sits within that pull - between movement and stasis, vitality and inertia. Death, in this context, can also be understood as suspension or stillness - perhaps even as a contemporary revisiting of the still life tradition. This becomes quite explicit in Wanting Yearning, where a staged tableau brings these forces into play.
In terms of materiality, I often return to certain images or forms - graffiti, vapes, flames, plant life - things that already carry cultural or social charge. From there, I want to see what happens when they’re translated into different materials, and how that shift alters their register or affect. That’s where humour often comes in: a plastic plant becomes gold; graffiti becomes carefully laser‑etched. There’s a slight absurdity in turning something fleeting or disposable into something precise and permanent, and that humour helps draw out the tensions I’m interested in.
You mentioning photography made me think about how your work relates to movement and repetition, particularly the complicated relationship to repetition that is often present in addiction. It’s as though the work crystallises an experience and brings it into view through the materials.
That’s a really good observation. I hadn't really thought about it from that perspective, but yeah, you're absolutely right.
Psychoanalysis often views humour as a shortcut to unconscious feelings - like the Freudian slip - or Lacan and the use of metaphor and metonymy as processes that help to understand how the unconscious expresses desires - both of which can be used to think about sculptural practices or substitution and transformation. What do you think the humour reveals or conceals in your work?
I think humor is often used as a device for dealing with quite complex and difficult subjects - I suppose it offers a soft entry point, a way in which to safely draw the viewer into the work before revealing itself as something that is perhaps more critical - in my case critical not only of myself, but of the world in which we live in.
Sacrament, 2024. 24 Karat Gold, copper, plastic. Dimensions variable. Image by Will Slater
So yes, plastic gets electroplated with copper and gold - a commentary on the fetishisation of objects and substances - and a reflection on commodity, consumer culture and on value - and all the while the work is critiquing those capitalist economies - it is still very much embedded in those economies itself. So humor is an entrance to the multi-layered meanings embedded in the work. I suppose humor creates a moment where something feels familiar but also off. In that way, it does operate a bit like a slip or substitution. Something is displaced - a material, a context, a gesture - and in that displacement, other meanings start to surface. At the same time, humour can also conceal. It can soften or mask what might otherwise feel too direct or too heavy. I’m interested in that double movement, where humour reveals something but also keeps it partially out of reach.
Your work explores experiences of risk and compulsion, but the risky element is often undercut by the material of the sculpture. For example, fire can be incredibly destructive when we lose control of it, but in your work it is transformed into a beautiful and fragile glass work. It is cold and solid. Could you talk about the transformations of materials in your work and how that also transforms risk?
I think I will start with glass - it's such a beautiful alchemic material. Coming from silica and sand, basically ground down marine life and geological residue. It transmutes under intense heat, it changes state from a solid into a liquid. Dust quite literally becomes a solid object through that transformation. It is elemental, there is fire, earth, air (breath) and water involved in glass making - all of which are required at very specific times. The molten glass is probably over 1000 degrees in temperature - the hot shop is 38 degrees+ you are melting - and timing is crucial - you are performing risk - things crack and explode all the time - yet when you finish a piece - no one sees that effort and labour.
Ring of Fire, 2024 (detail). Steel, glass, silicone. 220 x 200 x 60 cm. Image by Will SlaterAfter a bit of cold working, it becomes very seductive and all that risk and performance is hidden. Risk is therefore embodied in the practice as well as being conceptually present - in the autoethnographic reflections on drug addiction - or more broadly reflecting on themes of fear and precarity in contemporary culture. In Wanting Yearning, through the glass, metal, concrete and ceramic works, they all to some degree navigate risk, or perhaps more specifically risk taking…
I hadn’t thought about the risk being embodied. That’s really interesting. Do you want to make that process visible in some way?
Yes. I’ve previously worked with sound artist Jia Lee. She came into the hot shop and recorded the sounds of the process - of steam, the furnace roaring, glass cracking, and my breath. She then composed a soundscape that accompanied an installation. The sound changed how the work was experienced, and the audience was very responsive. Since then, I’ve become more interested in how risk can be teased out through other means. I will also be collaborating with a performance artist in 2027, who has been invited to respond to the stained‑glass window, Revolution (2025), shown in Wanting Yearning. This project will take place at Leeds Art Gallery. While I can’t go into detail at this stage, the collaboration will involve a live response to the work and explore how movement and sound might sit alongside and activate the work.
Your work is described as queer minimalism - could you explain the term and your processes of creating queer minimalist artwork?
Robert Smithson wrote so brilliantly about minimalism, before it was really called minimalism in his 1966 essay Entropy and the New Monuments, in Artforum, where he reflects on the changing nature of sculpture and monumentality in the twentieth century.
He writes:
“Near the super highways surrounding the city, we find the discount centers and cut-rate stores with their sterile facades. On the inside of such places are maze-like counters with piles of neatly stacked merchandise; rank on rank it goes into a consumer oblivion. The complexity of these interiors has brought to art a new consciousness of the vapid and the dull. But this very vapidity and dullness is what inspires many artists.”
(Smithson, 1966, p. 13)
This interest in the artificial, man made and industrial appear in my works - but instead shift the masculinity associated with 1960s minimalist practices and instead bring in gender fluidity and re-orientate minimalist strategies through a queer lens, drawing on Sarah Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology (2006). I see my works as a reorientation. For me, queer minimalism is about working with reduced forms and controlled presentation, and industrial materials, but allowing affect, desire and the body to sit within that. Minimalism historically often aimed for neutrality or detachment. I’m interested in what happens when that language is queered - when surfaces become sexually charged, when materials carry trace, residue or intimacy. So the work might look minimal or restrained, but underneath that there’s something more excessive, more bodily, or even more unstable trying to come through.
In psychoanalysis compulsive behaviours transform something scary into a controllable behaviour - for example a fetish splits an object into something that is both adored and hated - desirable and repulsive. This comes to mind when I look at your work such as the laser-etched graffiti - something viewed as low value is elevated by your transformation but also removed from its original context / intended audience - desire is taken out of the wild and placed in the very controlled space of the gallery. Or the plastic plant covered in gold - How do you approach such an evasive and personal subject as desire (and risk, compulsion etc.)? Which aspects of social and cultural life do you draw upon in these works?
I often start with things that already exist in everyday life and reposition them - casting a vape in glass, for example. That shift brings in other layers of meaning. Questions around labour and production come into play, particularly the kinds of labour that are hidden within mass production. The original object is produced quickly, but I then spend weeks making a version that fits in the palm of your hand like a sweet and it feels cool, and seductive. Those qualities sit alongside a critique of labour and value. The work traces how meaning shifts through material change: how an object moves from being disposable to something that holds attention. The work moves away from the purely personal and leans toward a broader observation of cultural patterns - particularly those shaped by compulsion and repetition.
Fuck Me / Everything Sucks, 2024. Laser Etched Cast Glass. 6 x 3.5 x 1.5 cm each. Image courtesy of the artist
Some of your work speaks to liminal spaces that are in a grey area between public and private - such as the toilet in a club or cruising spot. The work evokes a risk of exposure and compulsion to expose yourself - which for LGBTQI+ communities is still very present. How did you choose which graffiti to recreate? Did you alter it or reproduce it exactly as it appeared? Toilets have also been a site of risk for LGBTQI+ people - increasingly so for trans people at the moment - does the artwork change as the political content changes?
LOVE MARS, 2024. Glazed tiles (laser etched), grout, MDF, steel. 32 x 46 x 3 cm. Image by Will Slater
The text has been photographed over the course of the past few years - I started in pub and club bathrooms - then extended to cruising spots, or historical sites The Temple in Manchester for example, a former public toilet, now a bar. It's important that there is authenticity - so I don't alter the phrases - they are etched roughly 1:1 in scale - so there is a direct proximity to the original environment. In the series Love Letters, the toilet cubicle can be understood as a heterotopic space, sitting between the public and private realms. This draws on Foucault’s notion of heterotopias - described as sites that hold contradictory functions and shifting relations to power. Love Letters traces some of these histories: queer encounters taking place in secrecy for fear of criminalisation; clubbers taking risks; moments of intimacy, hook‑ups and drug‑taking - all happening within environments that are still regulated and monitored. Those spaces have always carried a mix of intimacy, risk and exposure, and that remains the case. As the political climate shifts, the work shifts with it. Toilets continue to be problematic, particularly for trans people and this is embedded in the work and something I want to draw attention to.
I love the term lively matter - it works on a number of levels in your exhibition. There is an interesting relationship to liveliness in your work. The immaterial is often made permanent and solidified into a fixed thing (i.e. glass flames) - do you think of this as a containment of liveliness or a moment in a process of change? Does the artwork continue without? How do you think they will act / how would you like them to continue acting…?
Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010) has been influential. She suggests “vibrant matter” transmits force, memory, and emotion beyond its intended function, with the capacity to “act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (p. viii). I love this idea too. I think this, for me, is where some of the layers of meaning start to filter into the work - through lively, or animated matter. Through material residue, and histories that connect the works to the gendered and industrial landscapes of my upbringing. Transmitting ideas around labour and economy left for example in the surface of a weathered, hand made steel plinth. Or in the lively or volatile surface of a glass work titled The Volcano Lover (2022)- a reference to a Susan Sontag novel about desire. So the work doesn’t feel finished or closed in a way. It continues through how it’s encountered, how it’s read, and how it connects to other experiences or materials. I’m interested in objects that remain active, not literally moving, but still doing something in the world - that they continue to have a life of their own.
The Volcano Lover, 2022. Hand blown glass. 26 x 26 x 27 cm. Image by Will Slater
What’s next, do you have anything else on the horizon?
Yes. I will be collaborating with Jez Dolan and Portraits of Recovery (PORe) at The Whitworth in September 2026 for Recoverist Month. Jez and I will produce a live performance that takes the form of a rehearsal space. I don’t want to say much more than that - but I am very excited for this new direction…
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References:
Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Smithson, R. (1966) ‘Entropy and the new monuments’, Artforum, June.
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Alana Lake earned her bachelor’s in photography from the Arts University College, Bournemouth (2004) and later pursued postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Arts Schools, London (2009). She resided in Berlin for eight years, establishing and directing the award-winning project space Gravity Seeks Love. This initiative prioritised the support of female identifying and queer artists and curators, exploring intersections between psychoanalysis, philosophy, literature, and the arts. Currently undertaking a PhD at Manchester School of Art, Towards a Pathology of Desire, embraces an autoethnographic, practice-led approach. Her research focuses on materials such as glass, ceramic, and metal to explore whether addiction can be understood as a disease or, alternatively a 'biology of desire'.
Dawn Woolley is an artist. She is a research fellow at Leeds Arts University where she co-convenes the Thing Power Research group. She completed an MA in Photography (2008) and PhD by project in Fine Art (2017) at the Royal College of Art. Woolley’s research examines contemporary consumerism and the commodified construction of gendered bodies, paying particular attention to the new mechanisms of interaction afforded by social networking sites. Her latest publication Going Feral: Speculative Approaches to Animism in the Arts co-edited by Paula Chambers is available from Vernon Press.
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︎ @alanalake.studio
alanalake.com/
︎ @dawnwoolleystudio
dawnwoolley.com/
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If you like this why not read our interview with Luke Beech.
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