Conversation with Dan Lie

Sleeping Methodologies is a major solo commission by artist Dan Lie that represents a new chapter in their practice. Born out of a state of exhaustion and burnout, Lie’s new installation explores how crisis and fatigue can become catalysts for transformation. While still informed by their ongoing research into mortality and renewal, nonhuman ecologies and ritualistic ontologies, Sleeping Methodologies begins from a deeply personal place: the artist’s grief and fatigue, and their admitted need for a tabula rasa – a clean slate. From this state of crisis, Lie has created a total environment, bathed in yellow light and populated with objects and ‘other-than-human’ companions that invite both body and mind to pause, drift, feel, observe, engage and disengage. An anti-monumental provocation to take a step back and consider: What would happen if I stopped?

Nicole Yip (NY)
Sleeping Methodologies is born out of a particular set of personal circumstances: of tiredness, exhaustion, burnout. In previous projects, you have always worked with conditions of crisis as a kind of generative creative force. Can you tell us more about this artistic approach?

Dan Lie (DL)
For me, a crisis is a process of change, and it’s often a struggle to embrace it. I remember having existential crises since early childhood – and I still do. These moments were often accompanied by anguish. That anguish points towards transformation, but it’s hard to stay with it. Other feelings usually come into play: the sensation of being lost, the difficulty of letting go of control, anger. Yet it’s a necessary force. This reflects a Western societal dilemma: although everything in the world is bound to change, we are trained to resist it. We cling to stability, and letting go becomes difficult.

In some way, making an artwork is giving shape to what cannot be put into words. Perhaps crises become fuel, and the works translate a state of mind at a given moment. When I revisit past works, I remember what I was going through at the time.

I don’t make this explicit – the crisis usually remains personal, because my work is not about me – but it comes through in its mood, its energy, sometimes its intensity. It feels a bit of a cliché to say that crises lead to good art, but I’m fascinated by how, even without disclosing that narrative, people still sense this driving force.

NY
Your working methodology is underpinned by a set of ethics that is foundational to your practice. How does artistic production – and the process of bringing questions of exhaustive labour into the gallery – present opportunities to speculate more deeply on these?

DL
There’s a contradiction in presenting artworks shaped by exhaustion, when developing and producing an exhibition of Spike Island’s scale demands so much labour from so many people. But this is the trap of the society we live in – most of us cannot escape work. Productivity and rest are both contradictory and interdependent – rest only exists because we spend the rest of the time working. And today, even rest has become another kind of labour, with the pressure to use free time 'productively', as if it were an investment in becoming a better worker for our capitalist system.

I’m lucky to travel widely and connect with different cultures. Yet to my disappointment, overwork seems to be a universal value and the common thread is exploitation. We’re living through a recession, and everyone is exhausted. Do we just keep going? Or do we acknowledge this moment of fabricated scarcity? In recent years, exhaustion has become a physical limit for me, teaching me to say no.

Bringing exhaustion into the exhibition is a proposal for an experience, an aesthetic one. The show contains many new elements, and because my creative process is highly intuitive, I can’t fully predict what it will be or feel like. Its meaning and storytelling will emerge through the audience’s response, which I’ll carefully listen to.

NY
The process of developing this exhibition has been shaped by various engagements with Spike Island and its community over the past year, including two research visits and a series of public dialogues. Could you describe some key moments and the ideas they opened up for you?

DL
This is my first solo exhibition in England, but my relationship with this territory began long before. Like many, I’ve been shaped by the UK’s global influence – through colonisation and strategies of domination, but also through soft power, especially pop culture, which marked me deeply. For almost a decade I’ve also been researching the archaeological heritage of the UK and Ireland, with a particular interest in the Bronze Age and the 'bog people' preserved in swamps. In 2019, this research led to a survey show at Jupiter Artland, The Negative Years.

At Spike Island, the starting point was the uniqueness of the community – artists of different generations sharing space with art students from the university (UWE Bristol) – and the absence of a rest space, which I wanted to create.

The event series Honest Grieving for a Better Life also shaped the project, especially conversations with death doula Aly Dickinson and artist Abbas Zahedi, which revealed how limited our imagination around dying still is.

Another influence came from a Berlin research group I'm part of, the Berliner Programm Künstlerische Forschung, reflecting on slowing down, even stopping work altogether. I realised it felt easier to imagine my own death than to imagine no longer working – an individual echo of Mark Fisher’s often-cited line that it’s easier to picture the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

This project was also born out of personal burnout. While working on drawings, I carried a constant exhaustion that made me want to lie down all the time, and it intensified whenever I had to face the administrative side of my practice. That physical limit became part of the work itself.

NY
Do you see this exhibition as being site- or context-specific?

DL
Perhaps this exhibition is less site-specific than moment-specific. Last year, I staged five solo exhibitions across three continents – with the small studio I have, that was unsustainable. When you invited me to Spike Island, I asked if I could propose a humble gesture, something neither grandiose nor ambition-driven. My reference was an installation I created during the Covid lockdown, Reverb, shown at Cemeti Institute for Art and Society in Yogyakarta in 2020. I installed the whole piece myself due to distancing protocols, and the work carried another quality, tied to vulnerability.

That said, the exhibition also responds to Spike Island’s architecture, so in that sense it is site-specific. The presence of large stones links back to my research here earlier this year, including a magical visit to Stonehenge. But overall, the show is shaped by a specific moment of 'aesthetic exhaustion' and a rethinking of many areas of my life.

NY
You have often described this exhibition opportunity as tabula rasa, or 'blank slate' – a chance to start afresh, to be unburdened by past experiences and expectations. Indeed, this exhibition uses none of the materials that have come to be associated with your practice: soil, fungi, plants, rot and other ‘more-than-human’ collaborators. Can you tell us about the materialities of the exhibition and what has informed these?

DL
The ethics behind my practice mean that the symbols in the exhibition remain implicit. It’s the audience who decides what the objects, codes, and iconographies signify for them. A single object can carry many meanings depending on who encounters it. For instance, what will the standing stones evoke for British visitors familiar with that mysterious history? And how might people from different contexts respond?

Key elements of the exhibition were produced with members of Spike Island’s Visitor Services and Technical teams, students from the University of the West of England’s Fine Art courses, and Proud to be, Creative Youth Network’s LGBTQ+ group:

Maya Albagli, Noah Barraclough, Elle Basaran, Jackson Bateman, Amy Coaten, Becca Leia Cooper, Theo Cuff, Eva Griffin, James Hankey, Ben Hartley, Sam Hunt, Rebecca James, Johnny Jones, Olivia Jones, Diana Lage, Jo Lathwood, Adele Lippiatt, Taiki Nakagawa, Shade Onitolo, Errol Perkins, Phoebe Rawson, Chloe Sclater, Michaela Shahini and Elliot Steele.

Sleeping Methodologies by Dan Lie, 27 September to 11 January 2026. The exhibition was supported by the Henry Moore Foundation.