Alyssa Warren: The Lake zine (limited edition, signed & numbered)

The Lake (2016-present) is a photographic series including portraiture, still lives and landscapes taken at a lake that has multigenerational significance to the artist's family.

Occupying the boundary between memory and imagination, The Lake explores the evolving relationship between people and their natural environment and how the visceral connection between psyche and place shapes identity, memory and the perception of time.

Shot with various analogue family cameras, The Lake continues a tradition of collective storytelling and memory-making both in process and form, expressing a legacy of shared, subjective landscapes formed through interwoven experiences over an extended period of time. As such The Lake serves as a palimpsest recording changes to the environment wrought both by natural forces and climate change.

 When a place is revisited, it becomes a touchstone – physically, emotionally, temporally – making the lake, in this series, both a clock and a well. The Lake appears to be monumental and permanent, but like people, it is never static, so as they come and go, and the lake’s water levels, shorelines and wetlands shift, a synergy occurs, though which internal, mirror landscapes form. Like people, the lake exhibits many contradictions and juxtapositions. Throughout a single day it can metamorphose from a mirror to an orange peel to a chipped plate to a jagged piece of slate. Its water is clear, but deep — it clarifies as it obscures. When its surface freezes, life moves below. Though nearly imperceptible, tides run deep within it.

The Lake series explores a shifting landscape that acts as a metaphor for human emotion, memory and the mysteries of the subconscious mind.

Alyssa Warren is a London-based writer and process-led artist practising photography, film, collage, printmaking and bookmaking. She is particularly interested in the intersection between photography and printmaking, focusing on experimental analogue and alternative photographic processes. Identity, memory, interiority and the role place plays in forming all three, are themes that run through all of her work.

The book comes with 3 different covers, you are welcome to specify which cover you'd prefer, in an email to us.