Rona Lee

AMA 2013 

HD Video with sound. 10’ 

Scientific survey footage of Undersea Hydrothermal Vents intercut with blind performer reading Braille text of Amant Marine: De Friedrich Nietzsche by french feminist, philosopher and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray.  “Lee takes on the mantle of the ocean as a metaphor for the female body that can point us in new directions, above and beyond, or perhaps through, the notion of an art/science encounter and into a subtly feminist art discourse [around] how the oceans operate in today’s social ‘imaginary’. ”Andrew Patrizio , 'VOLUME WITHOUT CONTOUR: THE WORK OF ARTIST RONA LEE', in Rona Lee: That Oceanic Feeling (Southampton: John Hansard Gallery, 2012) 

Conversations in the Sedgwick 2023 

HD Video with sound. 25’ 

Recording of live 30 mini field broadcast from the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, University of Cambridge, Collections Research Centre (a closed space). Designed by Cowper Griffith Architects 2019, it houses the collection (over 350,000 rocks with combined tonnage of around 50,000kg) and archive of the Sedgwick Museum; inaugurated 1904 and founded on the collection of Dr John Woodward, Professor of Physik (Medicine) 1665 – 1728. This exploratory work considers the archive as a displaced rockscape and as a spectral and volumetric environment - responding to the economic, scientific and personal mobilities /energies that formed it: opening drawers, handling specimens, re-voicing narratives of classification and exploring tensions between understandings of rocks as specimens, entities or exemplars.

 Made in collaboration with Louise K Wilson, Jean Boyd. In partnership with Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences, Rocky Climates Research Network (Lancaster University) and Rocky Futures exhibition T2M conference Konkuk Academy of Mobility Humanities, Seoul. 

Rona Lee PhD is a London based artist and former Professor of Contemporary Art at Northumbria University. Her critically engaged artistic practice encompasses a range of media: performance, video, sculpture, photography and collage. She also writes on the capacity of artistic methods to support new forms of thinking. Lee is currently the recipient of an award from Arts Council England to support research within the collections of the Sedgwick and Lapworth Geological Museums and has recently completed a commission 'Mineralis Insurrexi' for Worlds Apart, at MAC, Birmingham. From 2013 - 21 she was Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University, UK and Leverhulme Artist in Residence at The National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, between 2009-12. Latest publication - I’n Love with the Lithosphere - journeying towards the Anthropocene through the paper landscapes of the Modern’ in eds. Cincik, B, Torres-Campos, T. Postcards from the Anthropocene: Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation. (dpr-barcelona 2022)