“Things have started to float. It’s as if the solid ground has given away, leaving us hanging like tender cocoons, suspended in a dream world… A vibrancy alive with gamers, hoarders, addicts, and shopping malls.”
Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (2007, p. 61)
 

Haarlem Artspace is pleased to announce Wanting / Yearning, a solo exhibition by Sheffield-based artist Alana Lake. Bringing together works developed during Lake’s practice-led PhD at Manchester School of Art, the exhibition is rooted in autoethnography and queer minimalism. Drawing on her post-industrial, working-class background, Lake mobilises materials such as glass, ceramic, wax, metal, and concrete to question how addictive forces become embedded in culture and society as both material and affective conditions.

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A key driver of Lake’s practice is lived experience, which operates as a lens through which to examine desire, risk, and compulsive repetition - dynamics that resonate across many facets of contemporary life. Her work often sits at the threshold between pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, seduction and threat. Concrete paving slabs embedded with syringes, a daredevil hoop of steel and glass, and glass-cast vapes shimmer with seductive allure, while wax vapes slowly burn as emblems of a contemporary still life. What emerges is a meditation on desire - how it attaches, accumulates, and leaves its trace on the world.

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Born in Tamworth (1981), Lake earned her bachelor’s in photography from the Arts University College Bournemouth in 2004, and later completed postgraduate studies at the Royal Academy of Arts Schools, London, in 2009. She has received numerous awards and funding, including a DYCP from Arts Council England (2024/25), a Research Scholarship and Project Space Award from Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa (2022, 2018), a NEUSTART Stipendium from Deutscher Künstlerbund (2021), and the Dunoyer de Segonzac and Michael Moser Awards from the Royal Academy of Arts (2008, 2009). www.alanalake.com