The Hive: Issue Three
Alana Lake
Reflexivity in Sculptural Practice by Alana Lake
Article Information
Published: 2025
Type: brief communication (2,000 – 5,000 words)
Author(s): Alana Lake
ISSN: 2977-3954
DOI: https://doi.org/10.60844/kt8b-nx74
Download: Full Article
Abstract
This practice-led contribution explores destruction as a sculptural methodology rooted in material reflexivity. Through salvaged car parts, deployed airbags, broken mirrors, steering wheels, and hand-blown glass, the work confronts rupture as both a literal and conceptual process. Informed by a background of working-class, post-industrial environments and lived experience of addiction, the practice situates destruction as an affective, repetitive, and generative force. These works embody compulsion toward excess and collapse, retaining the trace of trauma while offering space for transformation.
Drawing from Paul Virilio’s theory of the integral accident, ‘to invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway’ (2007, p. 10), the research considers how material damage becomes a communicative gesture. The airbag emerges as a conceptual embodiment of systems designed to rupture under pressure. This research also engages with theories of vibrant matter (Jane Bennett), animated toxicity (Mel Y. Chen), and brutal aesthetics (Hal Foster), treating materials as co-agents in an intra-active choreography. As Bennett asserts, ‘I want to emphasise, even overemphasise, the contributions of nonhuman forces’ (2009, p. 5).
Here, destruction enacts, staging the tension between containment and release, between eros and thanatos. These sculptural processes mirror broader psychological, technological, and ecological patterns of collapse and regeneration. ‘The acceleration of History is disturbing,’ writes Virilio (2007, p. 52), a sentiment that reverberates through this material language of impact and strain. Destruction is not only inevitable, but also a method of making and knowing.
Keywords
Destruction; Material Reflexivity; Rupture; Transformation; Trauma
Biography
Alana Lake (b. 1981) in Tamworth, Staffordshire, holds a bachelor’s in photography from the Arts University College, Bournemouth (2004), and completed postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Arts Schools, London (2009). Based in Berlin for eight years, Lake founded ‘Gravity Seeks Love’, supporting female identifying curators and queer practitioners. Currently pursuing a PhD at Manchester School of Art, her research, titled ‘Towards a Pathology of Desire’ adopts an autoethnographic practice-led approach to investigate the relationship between addiction and desire. The project focuses on materials, specifically glass, ceramic, metalwork and expanded drawing, to explore whether addiction can be regarded as a disease, or instead a biology of desire. Lake has been awarded the Andrew Stewart Artist Award (2023), Research Scholarship from Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa (2022), Studio Funding Award from BBK (2021), NEUSTART Stipendium from Deutscher Künstlerbund (2021), Project Space Award from Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa (2018), Dunoyer de Segonzac Award (RA, 2009), and Michael Moser Award (RA, 2008). Her body of work reflects a commitment to exploring the intersection of art, psychoanalysis, and queer identity.