Dr Lana Locke

Biography

I am an artist practising in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, painting and performance.

I am interested in the 'feral' – out of place, between the wild and the civilised - and the artistic and political promise of this indeterminacy.

In my materially embedded research, I reflect on practical and ethical problems of working as an artist in the context of the immediate physical and political environment. My practice-based PhD on The Feral, the Social and the Art Object (2017) explored gendered and racialised extensions of social abjection, including in relation to my own position as an artist mother, London’s gentrification, as well as the racist connotations of Kenneth Clarke's citing of a "feral underclass" responsible for the 2011 London Riots.

Postpandemic, my conception of the feral extends to an ecofeminist recognition of a viral, global interconnectedness between species that ignores patriarchal hierarchy. I seek to reclaim the feral to undermine distinctions of racial, gendered and social privilege; and human and non-human needs in terms of the precarious ecology of the planet.