#02 Alana Lake, Desire and the Goddess, 2021. Photograph. 21 x 20cm

Alana Lake, Artist and Award Winning Curator was born in Tamworth, Staffordshire, UK, 1981, currently living and working in Berlin.

Lake studied at the Arts University College, Bournemouth undertaking a BA (Hons) in Photography later she studied Fine Art at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, completing her arts education in 2009.

In 2018 the Berlin Cultural Senate awarded Lake the Project Space and Initiatives Award to her curatorial focused project space, GSL Projekt (Gravity Seeks Love) in acknowledgement for excellence for on-going contribution to the Berlin arts scene.

Lake also studied Psychoanalysis at The Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London. Psychoanalytic discourse is central to her fine art and curatorial practices.

She categorises her work by three on-going bodies of production –

OUTERSPACES & OTHERPLACES (started in 2001) a psychogeography that explores emotional landscapes within everyday phenomena.

STILLEVEN (2006-present) a contemporary still life project mixing the explosive potential of firearms with the traditional still life motif.

PLEASURE DRIVE is a play-on-words that takes inspiration from Freud’s paper Beyond The Pleasure Principle investigating the conflation of his mythological constructs the Life and Death Drives. Pleasure Drive is therefore a response to this primal energy as the work journeys through symbolism, movement, stillness, speed, conflict, hedonism, fetishism, gender, sexuality, queer identity, power, excess and sexual lust. With its changing states, strengths and weaknesses combined with its malleable glossy surface, glass is one medium, which I’m using to explore Pleasure Drive.