Nicholas Lees

This work is about perception. I am interested in the ephemerality and uncertainty of perception. Our visual experience of reality is conditional upon light, space and body. This body of work originates in an attempt to manifest qualities of shadows as representations of the hinterland between two and three dimensions and between presence and absence, so making a material penumbra. These ideas are also informed by a lifetime of looking at the same stretch of Scottish coastline, bringing the realisation that the constant shift of tide, weather and light mean the experience of perception is forever transient.
My aesthetic combines minimalism with complexity and the origination of my ideas and works is rooted in thinking through material and process.

The pieces are thickly thrown on the wheel, dried slowly and evenly before fins are formed through lathe turning of the leather hard clay before firing. This making draws on precedents from the industrial production of electrical insulators to the use of throwing and lathe turning by Wedgwood since the 18th century. The introduction of colour originates in ink drawings, in which the interaction between wet and dry is used as a parallel for movement and the uncertainty of perception. Colouring comes from soluble metal salts applied through a combination of saturation and evaporation so that the colour travels through the form and concentrates on the edges. Monochrome works are using a narrow palette of white, grey and black clays reflecting the origin of the work in light and shadow.