MANCHESTER.- Through large-scale print works, film and sculpture, this exhibition reflects on power, protest, memory, and survival. Exhibiting together for the first time, Ismail and Lake’s works weave together narratives that are at once personal, political and historical. Their work is as vibrant as it is fragile, with layers of texture and imagery inviting us to consider how histories of erasure and survival continue to shape the present - especially in a moment marked by war, censorship, and the criminalisation of protest.
The artists say: “Against a backdrop of climate crisis, social inequality, political unrest, and the erosion of human rights, the proposed exhibition asks: what is the role of the artist in times of crisis?”
Printmaking frequently acts as the starting point in Ismail’s work, which explores speculative ecology, memory, and the repetition of erased or hidden histories. Drawing on family archives and on her investigation into what she describes as Somali culture’s ‘stuck-ness,’ Ismail reflects on the feeling of living within recurring histories and carrying them across generations. For this exhibition, Ismail is producing a new series of large-scale woodblock prints, layering imagery, wood grain patterns and cosmic textures, treating the carved surface as an astral plane. Figures emerge moving through multiple worlds at once, forming a threshold between the living, the lost, and those preserved in remembrance.
Lake’s works combine glass, marble, waste materials, metal, concrete and wax to explore themes of compulsion and risk, whilst exposing the fragile architectures that shape contemporary life. Her work with glass invokes themes of instability and precarity. In places, flecks of green uranium glass melt into pools of deep red and copper hues that resemble blood or bodily fluids. The colour palette evokes environmental degradation, war, contamination, and the depletion of natural resources. Shaped by a working-class, post-industrial upbringing, she gravitates toward materials that carry social and emotional density: fractured car parts, cast wax, hand-blown glass, and waste fragments that bear the marks of labour and use. Through sculpture, she investigates how objects are ritualised, fetishised, and invested with symbolic weight, tracing the connections between personal experience and broader contemporary conditions. Lake’s piece, With Force (2025), a cast glass police truncheon, reflects on the shifting boundaries of state power, public voice, and the right to assemble and protest. While her marble baseball bat aligns contemporary violence with the material language of classical sculpture.
Ismail and Lake have curated a dynamic public programme to accompany the exhibition. The exhibition has been devised alongside being a site for a public programme of events. This programme will transform the artworks into something collective, activating the gallery as a space of refusal, care, and shared experience.Guided by this ethos, the exhibition is taking shape as an evolving dialogue expressed through materials, gestures, and forms, between the artists, their works, and the audiences who move among them.
