In conversation with Dr Lana Locke

“The project has made me appreciate how sculpture and direct engagement with materials really raises awareness of the dilemmas and compromises we make in how we use materials and resources.”

 - Dr Lana Locke

Lana Locke. Image by Charlotte Warne-Thomas.

Dr Lana Locke, Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London, is a multidisciplinary visual artist whose work spans sculpture, painting, drawing, video, and performance. Self-taught for over a decade before gaining postgraduate qualifications, Lana’s practice focuses on sustainability, materiality, and community engagement. In this interview, she discusses her project A Feral Plot, developed through an Arts Council grant and her residency at Camberwell Space, which explores sustainable sculpture-making using reused materials and embraces unpredictability. Lana highlights the collaborative nature of her work with both materials and local communities, reflecting on how art can engage with the climate emergency and challenge boundaries between institutional spaces and their environments through the concept of the “feral.”

A Feral Plot brings your sculptural practice into direct contact with place, people, and climate. How did the project begin, and how has it evolved through your time at Camberwell College of Arts?

It began with my Arts Council ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ grant (November 2024-April 2025) as a search for more sustainable ways of making sculpture. This included regional research, making new cast metal sculptures with Coles Castings and their innovative biofuel-powered foundry in Dorset run on recycled vegetable oil; and developing a publication with Melanie Jackson through short residencies at the Poor House Reading Rooms and the Henry Moore Institute of writing and drawings reflecting on the compromises and dilemmas of using different types of sculpture materials. My project evolved at Camberwell College of Arts, firstly in making new ceramic sculptures from salvaged clay and recycled glaze pigment, with expert advice and innovation from James Duck (Specialist Technician in Ceramics at Camberwell College of Arts); and now through the studio experimentation and collaborative workshops of my residency in Camberwell Space.

You’re working with reused materials, objects with their own pasts. Do you see them as collaborators in the work?

Yes! Collaborating beyond the human - that’s a nice way of thinking about it! The plant matter and objects are like gifts that I come across, which bring their own material qualities to navigate. Some objects really shift the narrative. I came across very striking bull kelp seaweed on the beach in Scotland during my New Contemporaries residency at Hospitalfield at the end of 2023, and this seaweed has continued to play out in my work many times over: as found object, cast in metal, remade in clay, and then thought over in my film-in-progress Becoming Frogphlegm as an artefact of a sea that ‘once’ was swimmable.

What role does unpredictability play in your process, do you allow the work to shift as it unfolds?

Yes, there's a definite sense of provisionality incorporated in my process which is part of what makes the practice more open and playful. Last week, for example, I unexpectedly found a broken bollard right outside the College, and not only brought that into the Feral Plot space but have also started using the texture of it to roll onto the clay and transform that material too. When firing clay, the recycled glaze pigment can be unpredictable as it is gathered from the spray booth as a conglomeration of lots of different colours - but I enjoy that sense of experimental alchemy and not knowing exactly what to expect.

Hosting public workshops brings other voices into your practice. How do you balance personal vision with collective input?

The vision for the project was collaborative from the outset, and local community input very much a motivation for undertaking the residency and part of how the project has evolved. This is why Camberwell Space is such an important space within the vibrant South East London community and its work with the local community in Camberwell and Peckham made it the perfect host for my residency.  The workshops have taken place in the heart of the residency but now coming towards the end of it, I’ve had some weeks to reflect on that collective practice that is still here in sculptures and on the walls of the space and respond to it with my own further experimentation and shaping of the space as a whole-gallery installation that continues to grow and move within the Feral Plot.  

Lana Locke - A Feral Plot, Camberwell Space, Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, Image credit Lana Locke/ Melanie Jackson.

The climate emergency can feel overwhelming. Has making this work helped you process your own relationship with it?

The project has made me appreciate how sculpture and direct engagement with materials really raises awareness of the dilemmas and compromises we make in how we use materials and resources. We might be a relatively small sector when compared, for example, with the design and fashion industries, but the direct relationship of the maker with materials speaks directly to the dilemmas that the public are making at home too. If we embed the climate emergency into how we make and communicate art across the sector then this has a cultural value that has the power to speak more loudly, politically.

Through your workshops, you’ve welcomed the local community into your process. What have these shared moments taught you?

The drop-in sessions have been full of surprises in terms of who comes along, from parents and babies to teenagers, visitors from out of town, and local people wandering past who see the sign outside and fancy getting involved with clay. I have found that if you don’t direct people as to what they should make, they always bring their own ideas and forms from their engagement with the material. The Art Working Parents group came to visit and working with clay we had a great discussion about how art institutions can be more welcoming to parents, and they were a brilliant test audience for Becoming Frogphlegm. I hosted a dinnerless dinner for the Subvectivities and Feminisms Research Group, with some fantastic performances reflecting on feminism and ecology, including some unexpected theatrical improv. I am still smiling every day as I look at the ambitious drawings and sculptures that the local Lyndhurst Primary School children created here, who taught me that clay can sustain children’s attention for longer than even I expected!

What does feral mean to you in the context of this project? Is it a feeling, a method, or something else entirely?

My interest in the feral has sustained me over a long period. It began in 2011 with the London Riots, when I was shocked to hear the then Lord Chancellor, Kenneth Clark describe those who rioted is a ‘feral underclass’, casting them as outside of ‘civilised’ society. This influenced my incorporation of found (rejected) objects in my practice, and I went on to write my PhD on The Social, the Art Object and the Feral to reclaim the feral as an engagement with radical democracy and a means of disturbing distinctions between the wild and the civilised. This way of thinking developed further during the Covid 19 pandemic in terms of ecology and climate change, when our capitalist encroachment on wild territories in China seemed to like to have triggered the interspecies jumping that is said to have caused the virus. Now in 2025 the feral in this project is an invitation to disturb the perceived separateness of an institutional exhibition space from surrounding local communities and its wider environment; and to think collectively about responsive ways of making art in a compromised ecology.

Lana Locke - A Feral Plot, Camberwell Space, Camberwell College of Arts, UAL, Image by University of the Arts London 2025.

The [Quick] #FLODown:

Best life advice?

Your shoulders are broader than you might think. Have courage!

 Last song you listened to?

 My kids singing Golden by KPop Demon Hunters.

 Last book you read?

 The Mercies by Kiran Millwood Hargrave.

 Can’t live without…?

 Swimming.

What should the art world be more of and less of?

 More experimental and inclusive, less elitist and commercial.

A Feral Plot at Camberwell Space concludes with open studios on 4, 5, 11 and 12 September, and a closing event on 16 September 2025.

On Tuesday 16 September 2025, there will be a celebration marking the culmination of artist and Senior Lecturer Lana Locke’s summer residency, A Feral Plot (Making Sculpture and Other Strategies for Survival), which explores the conflicted challenges of making sculpture during the climate crisis.

The residency exhibition will be a chance to see the body of work Lana has produced during this period, including her evolving film-in-progress Becoming Frogphlegm and new sculptures. Visitors will also be able to see how the collective installation in the Space has developed, featuring sculpture made with salvaged clay and charcoal drawings on the walls, which visitors to the Space over the summer have helped to create.

Lana will give an informal walkaround of the exhibition space at 6.30pm.

About Camberwell Space

Camberwell Space is a gallery at Camberwell College of Arts that is free and open to everyone. The space aims to engage and connect by working with the local community in Camberwell and Peckham and supporting UAL research. Camberwell Space’s multi-disciplinary programme includes residencies, commissions, events and exhibitions, working in collaboration with professional artists, designers and curators.

About Camberwell College of Arts

Camberwell College of Arts, UAL is a renowned art and design college driving positive social impact through art and design. Its unique studio culture offers students the freedom and support to explore their individual creativity using facilities that embrace both traditional craftsmanship and digital technology. The College is passionate about social citizenship whilst maintaining the view that the arts must remain committed to the rewards of free inquiry and experimentation. Its students benefit from staff who take immense pride and care in guiding students in a journey of discovery helping them develop the critical thinking, making skills and social sensibilities that equip them to thrive both individually and in their communities.