Lana Locke:
THE MATERNAL MARKDOWN
Drawings from the Feral Years
2-5 July 2026, Private view Thursday 2 July, 6-8pm
The Maternal Markdown brings together a substantial body of drawings made alongside the ongoing demands of motherhood. Made over several years, the works focus primarily on the artist’s children and form an extended study of early girlhood in its feral, unscripted state. Working in charcoal, pastel, and watercolour on Khadi paper, the drawings record scrawled figures lounging on sofas, intense sibling negotiations, bursts of play and fighting, and the shifting dynamics of attention and proximity that structure a chaotic domestic life. Alongside these central studies of Locke’s daughters, other works attend to objects: nappies, toys and plant forms encountered, handled and discarded, extending the field of observation into the wider environment in which these interactions unfold. Together they form an accumulated study of domestic experience from babyhood to primary school— what might be described asthe feral years of a family life.
Installed as a dense, wall-to-wall field, the exhibition transforms the gallery into an unfolding archive of looking and recording. Individual works operate as fragments or notations, while together they form a larger ecology of experience shaped by repetition, interruption and care. The installation is not fixed but responsive, changing as works are viewed and acquired. All works are available, with special accessible price, for this “markdown” exhibition. This deliberate flattening of value reflects on the uneven systems through which creative labour — and particularly maternal labour — is recognised, measured and exchanged.
About the artist
Lana Locke is an artist working across a range of media including sculpture, drawing, installation, video, painting and performance. She is interested in the feral – out of place, between the wild and the civilised - in the context of hybrid identities, and political and ecological crisis. The feral is also how she interprets her art practice, as it exists between disciplines and between different spheres, including the tensions of straddling domestic and art-making spaces as an artist mother. Drawing runs in parallel to her sculptural work. Made in charcoal during fleeting intervals of time, these works act as a record of lived experience through a maternal and feminist lens, while also opening out into wider considerations of human and non-human interconnection, often with a darkly poetic and humorous edge.
Lana Locke has had solo exhibitions at ADH Gallery, Lungley Gallery, Camberwell Space, and DOLPH Projects, and group exhibitions at the Royal Academy, the ICA, the Bluecoat, Spike Island, Matt’s Gallery, Hales Gallery, National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, OOF Gallery, Kingston Museum, MOCA Taipei, Hilbertraum, Berlin and Block 336. She has published articles in OOF Magazine, Third Text, Visceral Bodies and the European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is a Senior Lecturer in Fine Art at the University of the Arts London, where she is Co-Convenor of the Subjectivity and Feminisms Research Group, and EARTH (Ecological Arts Research Transdisciplinary Hive).
