Lana Locke
Mother's Milk
Video
2016
Mother’s Milk (2016) documents my embodied experience of being a mother and PhD student and needing to express milk in various dirty, makeshift, spaces in and out of college (often toilets). The video acts in dialogue with inherited attitudes towards women through an interview of Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s on childcare.
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. The feral is also how I interpret my art practice, as it exists between disciplines and between different spheres as I explore the tensions of straddling domestic and art-making spaces as an artist mother. Both children were born during my practice-based PhD at Chelsea College of Arts, and my management of their care quickly became an embedded part of my art practice, as my research actively reflects on the practical problems of working as an artist in the context of the immediate physical and political environment. In my poster image, Mother’s Milk (2016), and then in Making (Babies) (2020), I not only contemplate how I spend my time whilst managing children, but the guilt and tension at play in doing so. This inspiration from my position as a parent expanded further into whole-gallery installations. For example, in Making (Babies) (2020) I transformed the basement space of Lungley Gallery in East London into a semi-domestic environment where I explored my interest in the ‘feral’, as an out-of-place existence, between wild and domestic spheres. Relics of procreation and child-rearing appeared as creaturely waste that had outlived its above-ground functionality, scavenging a new existence. My later video, Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (2021), took my responsibility for the domestic laundry as the starting point to explore our entangled subjective positions within a family structure and our ecological responsibility for the planet.
I have exhibited at the ICA (London), Block 336 (London), OOF Gallery (London), Spike Island (Bristol), Hales Gallery (London), The Bluecoat (Liverpool), MOCA Taipei and National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, Taiwan. I am represented by Lungley Gallery.
