A Feral Plot: Opening Event

Research and Public Engagement at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon warmly invite you to an evening showcasing recent research by artists and academics Lana Locke and Melanie Jackson. Please join us for a film screening, publication launch and in-conversation exploring the conflicted challenges of making sculpture at a time of climate crisis. This will be followed by refreshments hosted at Camberwell Space, to mark the beginning of the collaborators’ residency A Feral Plot – Making Sculpture and Other Strategies for Survival.

Order of events:
6.15pm: Audience arrival

6.30pm – 7.30pm: Camberwell Peckham Rd Lecture Theatre

• Screening of Becoming Frogphlegm by Lana Locke

• A Feral Plot publication launch, introduced by Melanie Jackson

• Lana Locke and Melanie Jackson in-conversation with writer and critic Colin Perry

7.30pm – 8.30pm: Camberwell Space

• Explore Locke and Jackson’s open studio at Camberwell Space
• Raise a glass with us in Camberwell Space to celebrate the beginning of the residency

The event officially launches Lana and Melanie’s Public Engagement residency at Camberwell Space (May - September 2025), in which they will bring their regional research back to Camberwell, transforming the Space into an open studio to experiment, explore and develop public-facing activities for local communities to engage.

The Undergraduate Show at Camberwell College of Arts will also be open to the public from 12pm-8pm on the day - please visit! The Design courses will exhibit at Peckham Road, with Fine Art courses showing a 5 minute walk away at Camberwell College of Arts, 1 Wilson Road, London, SE5 8LU.

Free, open to everyone. Booking essential.
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Becoming Frogphlegm is an evolving video artwork that elaborates Lana’s amphibious journey as the interspecies character of Frogphlegm, creatively weaving her sculptural research with the landscapes and waterscapes she has hopped and swum through. This screening provides a unique opportunity to engage with Lana’s research at a significant stage in the project’s evolution, inviting reflection and dialogue. Lana has developed this film in parallel to her collaborative publication with Melanie, A Feral Plot.

A Feral Plot can be read as a map, a plot, a starter conversation to bring Lana and Melanie’s work and research into dialogue, in the lead up to their residency in Camberwell Space. The publication - in the format of a fold-out map - has been used to plot images and words from their research as creaturely interlopers on archive and current maps of Camberwell College of Arts and Camberwell Space. They aim to draw out the emotional landscape and complexities, invention and nuance of living with and making sculpture amidst a changing climate, of circulation, marine ecologies, liquid and solid metals, clays and cretes. Melanie will introduce the publication of A Feral Plot by Poor House Reading Rooms, and share new animated drawings she is developing alongside her collaborative research with Lana.

Both film and publication respond to Lana and Melanie’s collaborative research on strategies for making sculpture in a climate emergency, supported by Lana’s recent Developing Your Creative Practice award from the Arts Council (2024-25), the CCW Staff Research Fund (2024-25), and partners the Poor House Reading Rooms and Coles Castings in Dorset, the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds, and the Royal College of Art in London.

About the contributors

Dr Lana Locke is an artist practising in sculpture, installation, painting, drawing, video and performance. She undertook her practice-based PhD (2018) on The Feral, the Social and the Art Object at Chelsea College of Arts, where she had also studied her MA in Fine Art (2012).

Locke is interested in the political promise of the feral, as a state of indeterminacy between the wild and the civilised, in the context our current political and ecological predicament. The feral is also how she interprets her art practice, as it exists between disciplines and between different spheres: postpandemic, interspecies conglomerations of matter, squished together like corrupted fossils of metal, fabric, digital video and paint.

She has had solo exhibitions at ADH Gallery, Lungley Gallery, Liddicoat & Goldhill project space, DOLPH Projects and Schwartz Gallery. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at the ICA, the Bluecoat, Spike Island, Matt’s Gallery, Hales Gallery, National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts, OOF Gallery, Kingston Museum, MOCA Taipei, the Nunnery Gallery, Block 336 and White Conduit Projects. She is Co-Convenor of the Subjectivity and Feminisms Research Group (UAL) and the Ecology Researchers Network (UAL).

Dr Melanie Jackson is an artist and educator who works with assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image.

There is a focus on bio-technologies, and circulatory systems at shifting scales from the miniscule to the planetary. She draws out tales of excess and the absurd, and inventive ways of getting by. She brings together different tactics of representation: mimicry, documentary, myth fabrication, science, performance, humour, animation, political commentary, music, installation, craft and the cultivation of aesthetic delight.

Selected solo exhibitions: Arnolfini, Aspex, Chapter, San Mei Gallery Block 336, Grand Union, Primary, Banner Repeater, the Drawing Room, Flat Time House, John Hansard Gallery and Matt’s Gallery where she is represented. She has exhibited in group shows including at the Wellcome Collection (London), eva+, (Ireland), DRF Biennale, (Osaka, Japan), ZKM Museum of Contemporary Art, (Karlsruhe, Germany).

Dr Colin Perry is a Senior Lecturer and arts writer, with an ongoing research interest in rurality and landscape in relation to contemporary art and visual cultures. As an arts writer for publications such as Art Monthly, he has covered diverse media, from painting, drawing and sculpture to performance, film and video.

Colin has a specialist interest in artists’ moving image cultures, lens and screen-based media, television, and notions of publics and radical media activism. His first single-authored book, Radical Mainstream: Independent Film, Video and Television in Britain, 1974–90 (Intellect, 2020), examines the role of independent film and video art in re-shaping media ecology and public discourse. He has written widely on contemporary art for specialist arts magazines, journals and books; including an edited volume titled Art and the Rural Imagination (MTP, 2022),which based on a conference that he convened.

Colin currently teaches at Arts University Bournemouth, and has taught at universities including Central Saint Martins (UAL) and University of Westminster, London. He has worked with a range of major arts institutions including Tate, Hayward Gallery and Camden Art Centre. He is the editor of numerous publications for specialist publishers such as Phaidon Press.