Relic Garden

In Relic Garden Lana Locke creates an apocalyptic environment of relics of human and non-human life, in a play of sculpture, installation, video and painting.

In this garden, plants are not borne of the ground, but the crucible, alchemised into bronze and aluminium, pinned, potted and placed about the barren space. Contrasting materials like plastic and plaster are forced into the mix, playing in survivalist kinship with the value-laden metal.

Three Graces of cut and shellacked palm fons, are as mortal as they are ethereal. They dance around a dead branch that grows from a tailor’s dummy mount, their monstrous bodies closer to dried out meat than to an idealised female form.

Shiny, dangling, swimsuited bodices hang from above, as if similarly skinned from flesh, suspended in glistening inertia. One of these bodies, Between Labours, takes on a narrative of domestic responsibility, its smoothness interrupted by objects of abjected labour: a prickly feather duster piercing the crotch, a child’s knobbly, knocked-around garden fork slicing through the arms. The swimsuit stretches in leisurely pursuit, querying its fixity of gender and as shiny bioresin stiffens and slickens its bulging contours. Dried flowers spill from its pelvis, at once phallic and womb-like, in a shrivelled, cross-species collusion to battle mortality, as pleasure is interrupted further by a signal of natural demise. It is at once inviting and rejecting tactile interaction: the handheld elements of labour interrupting the desire to touch, with the hand’s familiarity with a less desirable, functional relationship to these tools.

Playing in the background is Locke’s film, Journeys of a Laundry Mountain (2021), which articulates more fully some of the themes hinted at in the objects. The exploration of her own responsibility for the domestic laundry draws out her complicity with heteronormative white patriarchy and colonialism, cut with humourous clips of found footage showing up inherited roles of gender and race. The mountain of tangled laundry that Locke has to sort, moves through locations where she films herself hanging out clothes, from the gentrifying area of South East London where she lives, to her parent’s “junkyard and jungle” in South East Queensland. Filmed in the wake of the Australian forest fires of 2019, she explores the cultural and ecological violence of colonialism on the indigenous culture and landscape there, paralleled with the beginnings of the Covid 19 pandemic, and its origins in our encroachment on and abuse of wild territories. A call is here made for a parental relationship to the earth, which moves beyond our narrow sense of family.

• Author
• https://lungleygallery.com/relic-garden/