At one remove, at least for now, war on another continent is served up daily almost as an extreme sport, played by the powerful through their proxies. Cowed, stifled and numb, the UK is coaxed out of protesting against the unfolding slaughter, and herded instead towards more trivial infelicities. The Middle East is on fire, but our population is mobilising against vape shops.

If the media increasingly resembles a looking glass burnished by billionaires to cast them in the most flattering light, then art can function as a mirror to the vanities of the present moment, reflecting back their ugliness. Certainly, Broken Ecologies, an exhibition in which Castlefield Gallery‘s spaces are co-habited by Deeqa Ismail and Alana Lake, engages head-on with the dead end of the present decade.

Set to the ominous click track of a Geiger Counter, the two artists have furnished the gallery’s two floors in complementary fashion, making attentive use of its street-facing windows and basement cul-de-sac. More metaphorically, if Broken Ecologies was a book, Ismail’s woodcuts would provide the illustrations, Lake’s sculptural works the photographic plates. In more concrete terms, Lake’s works draw attention to the instruments of violence, Ismail’s to their consequences; Lake’s to their crudity, Ismail’s, their cruelty.

In keeping with their archetypal nature, Lake’s pieces are latent with energies both concentrated and consecrated. With Force, for instance, recasts a set of police truncheons in glass, the see-through material an ironic commentary, perhaps, on how often their darker counterparts have been deployed with a lack of transparency. Laid out on display, moreover, their form is irrefutably phallic, exposing the masculine insecurities so often at the root of hard power.

That aforementioned Geiger Counter also owes its presence to Lake, its Cold War static like a BBC Radiophonic soundtrack to her Hidden Danger, in which a stack of uranium glass crockery fluoresces green as absinthe atop a serving trolley, pulsing with the inhospitality of state-sanctioned polonium poisoning.

The strength of Ismail’s work is more personal, resonating on a more human scale. What Survives Between Us, a woodcut with a henna colour palette, is arresting with the directness of its gaze. Composed, rather than staged, the red new-born at its centre is cradled by its burnt orange mother, both blazing out of the balanced blacks of the image and into the gallery space.

Ismail’s subjects are never types, but always recognisable as individuals, their inner scarring etched out painfully against the grain of the wood they are shaped from. Her technique reaches its apotheosis in the purgatorial Bound In The Dark, a blackness into which its lost souls have been cast, denied even the consolation of light.

Where there is a shared image system, it is most assuredly that of blood. It is spilt in Lake’s Fallout, streaked disquietingly across glass planetoids traced with uranium, like the disquieting red Rorschach blot of a barely-formed chick in a fertilised egg. Likewise, its heaviness weighs in her three oversized Blood Drops, like Hershey’s barbed wire Kisses, while above them – at street height – hangs Ismail’s Blood From Space, a stardust Sudanese mother and child set against an arterial crimson landscape.

The synergy of the artists’ respective approaches working in array, Broken Ecologies exemplifies exactly the kind of soft power that demagogues both deny and decry. Their reaction is the opposite of anaesthetic, peeling the plaster away from the wound, and, in doing so, opening up the hope of healing.

By Desmond Bullen, Chief Arts Correspondent

Main image: Alana Lake, Blood Drop. Broken Ecologies at Castlefield Gallery, 2026. Image courtesy of Alana Lake.

 

Broken Ecologies is at Castlefield Gallery, Manchester until April 19, 2026. For more information, click here.