EyeSore

Rona Lee’s Lithic Entanglements.  

In the mid-Fifties BBC TV show Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? prominent archaeologists were challenged to identify obscure artefacts removed from national collections. It turns out that, taken out of context, it can be very difficult to know what we’re looking at. We codify, frame, order, collect, and sort our way through the world’s complexity in order to simplify it. We tell stories that give shape to existence. In the absence of facts, we speculate. With the loss of vision, we hallucinate. 

Rona Lee understands that humans are compulsive meaning makers who deplore a vacuum. Her work elevates the inscrutable and embraces taxonomic messiness against our classificatory impulse to define and control the world.

Culture is a pivotal space for storytelling and museums are key sites through which stories are created and distributed. Vitrines, wall labels, lighting design and scenography are the grammar of curatorial work, providing nuance and interpretation to artefacts and artworks. Museum taxonomies emerged alongside other classificatory sciences of the 17^th century, such as botany and zoology, and these disciplines narrate the world by naming and hierarchising it. Interpretations are saturated with biases and power plays, hindering and helping us. Concepts calcify around assumptions that become sedimented into our institutions. Artists, however, are particularly adept at pulling apart the seams of the typical and the expected, opening up new ways to imagine and attend to the knotty and unresolvable. 

Lee’s work – across collage, installation, performance, and sculpture – revels in semantic disarray, loosening the classificatory logic that underpins certain human tendencies. Over the last five years, Lee has increasingly opened her practice to more generative modes of inquiry, expanding upon the situated enquiry that characterised her work as an academic to embrace experimentation untethered from conventional research demands. This has enabled a productive flourishing, emphasising studio-based activity which, while grounded in critical theories of post-humanism, feminism and representation has been led by curiosity and play.

Recent work features recurrent themes of mining and extraction, mineralogy, tourism, and the natural environment. She is drawn to images culled from post-war photo books of flora, fauna, landscapes, civic life, and architecture that depict the world as an endless frontier of unrestricted freedom and exploration, fuelled by cheap air travel and oil. Produced during a period of rapid economic growth across many Western economies, these images present a world designed to elicit desire. 

What is natural? Who defines beauty? When does a patch of grass become a garden, a weed a flower? When does nature become a landscape? Meaning requires context and framing. Concepts are naturalised over time through stories, which fix and stabilise the world. Questions structure our sense of reality, inferring their own taxonomies. They sort the world into right and wrong, good and bad. They define through exclusion. In talking about beauty, we also characterise its opposite: ugliness. 

Lee unravels and destabilises our relationship to the natural world, her work moving beyond binaries and definitions. She punctuates this archive of natural and luxurious imagery. With a background in performance, Lee notes how these sites are staged: manicured and intensified into consumptive sites of luxury and exoticism. In collaging, Lee reactivates the images, renewing them with a sense of liveness. In animating these images, their visual clarity is undermined.

The originating images are themselves classificatory, generating desire and cultivating entitlement in the world they depict – a world made by and for humans. As resources, they are plundered at every available opportunity: first at the material level, then at the symbolic and aesthetic levels. By meddling in these Lee muddies their coherence. In countenance to a dominant human-centric logic, in which nature is reduced to scenography, her work gestures towards a more intimate and unknowable relationship to the natural world. 

In the artist’s new series EyeSore, 2026, nature is put into intimate proximity with unattainable luxury taken from the glossy interiors of Elle Decoration. The windows in a minimalist interior are torn open, revealing oversized monkeys gazing into the space. Fungi populate the wardrobes of a stylish bedroom while a chic bathroom, replete with polished and mosaicked marble, opens out into a lava-like mineral form. These surreal collisions upend scale and trouble expectations of interspecies relations. While this is a world for and by humans, people remain largely absent in the work.  

The window, like the museum vitrine, frames what is behind the glass as an object of attention: nature and artefacts become domesticated and flattened. In framing, we edit out the inconvenient clutter from the world. Humans tend to prefer neat narrative arcs and tidy endings. One of the roles of art is to put the messiness back in and expand the frame. In Lee’s hands, the natural environment bites back, refusing to be cowed by human encroachment. 

Collage has often been intertwined with a certain iconoclasm. We can look to the history of early photomontage, with figures such as Hannah Höch, who wrestled quotidian imagery into surreal and hybrid worlds. More recently, Martha Rosler’s polemical montages contain violent images of American imperialism set against a backdrop of domestic coziness.  While distinct from Rosler’s excoriations, Lee’s imagery is similarly full of ominous portent. They each bring us into the discomfort of an inconvenient truthThis thematic focus, blurring the natural and human-made worlds, can be traced throughout the artist’s practice. A series of works made between 2023 and 2025 focuses on stones, minerals and excavation, probing the possibility of what the artist has referred to as a “lithic sensibility”. Mineralis Insurrexi, 2023, reworks cut-up photographs of mineral samples taken from mid-century coffee-table books, freed from the sterility of their coloured backgrounds. The resulting redacted plates create a fragmented grid spread across a series of angled black panels that jut out like basalt extrusions from the wall. Translucent coloured Perspex overlays the compositions, filtering and reframing the composition. 

In An Extractive Index, 2024, Lee expands her use of collage into the fabric of the museum, layering and colouring historic photographs of geological field trips taken from the archives of the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Science, Cambridge, onto the vitrines of its Whewell Mineral Gallery. Cutting the outline of crystal structures into the vinyl partially reveals the specimens within. In these works, concealment, revelation and extraction are conflated. Lee becomes her own geologist, mining the museum’s collections for (re)source material. The compositions and images that surface from these platforms embrace an opacity that counters the classificatory and editorialising agenda of the vitrine and magazine page.

In the same space the moving-image work A Modern Lapidary, 2024, features photographic museum postcards of mineral samples, digitally animated to move and pulse,  accompanied by a soundtrack composed of mining sounds and earth tremors. Back-projected onto vitrines containing glittering crystals, the heightened dissociative bricolage creates a spectral environment: minerals become ethereal and magical, reminding us that for certain communities, they are tasked with medicinal and spiritual qualities.

For Litho/Domous, 2025, shown as part of the group show The Geological Unconscious, Lee’s archive of picture-book imagery is expanded to include construction work, jewellery-making, sculpture, and industrial processes, alongside minerals layered across light boxes evoking computer screens. Illuminated from behind, the images and text bleed through, creating a double exposure. The display recalls a particularly frenetic laptop screen, scattered with unopened files and documents. In a typical gesture, arbitrary information and imagery collide. Lee’s gambit recalls a surrealist love of randomness and games such as Exquisite Corpse, where unexpected juxtapositions serve as moments of revelation, here updated for a digital age of abundance. 

Lee chooses to work with what’s around her: readily available and cheap materials. The work is about sustainability and is made sustainably. We can see Lee as an armchair tourist, scissors in hand, squaring up to the assumptive gaze embedded in the picture books and museums. For her, collage muddies the image’s semantic clarity. Like the artefacts in Animal, Vegetable, Mineral? her images open themselves to conjecture, casting her audiences as hesitant archaeologists. 

The binary between natural and human-made has arguably never been more enmeshed. The anthropogenic era has created thousands of new minerals and materials. Industrial detritus such as shipwrecks, mines and landfill sites interact with the environment, creating novel compounds. More minerals have been created since the 18^th century due to industrialism than in the previous two billion years. Minerals are the black box of humanity, tracing an archive of (in)activity.  

In the 17^th Century, European Enlightenment thinkers and practitioners sought to control the world by cataloguing it. This mindset created an extractive and expansionist framework built on the biases of a Euro-centric world view. There are similarities to our current predicament. We are living through a new industrial revolution, and technologies are ravenous for energy. Obscure minerals are suddenly in demand as source material for microchips and batteries. An extractive and expansionist mindset persists. AI is premised on eerily similar taxonomic concepts to those of early 17th-century classificatory sciences. The world becomes reduced to data points, flattened in the process of being named. 

Can we understand something by naming it? Lee’s work suggests not. Her work evidences the ways in which nature persists despite human intervention. In looking at her images, we’re reminded that the natural world resists our regulation. We’re living in the twilight of a certain set of stories built around a human obsession with control. In seeking a realignment with the natural world, Lee suggest a new role for humans humbled by their hubris. A world in which empathy is as important as knowability. 

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Dr George Vasey is a Curator and Writer based in Saltburn by the Sea. He has worked in curatorial departments at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Leeds Art Gallery, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, and Wellcome Collection. He has curated projects for Chapter Art Centre, KARST, Invisible Dust, PEER, Richard Saltoun, UAL, Newcastle University, Tate, and Southwark Park Galleries. His writing has been regularly published in magazines, journals and books. He is currently a Curator in Residence at Fitzrovia Chapel, London and 0.6 Senior Lecturer in Curating at Teesside University, Middlesbrough. He is Co-Chair at Grand Union, Birmingham and a member of AICA-UK.  

Dr Rona Lee is an Artist, based in London, working in a range of media. Over her forty year career Lee has exhibited and been commissioned widely within the UK and beyond, John Hansard Gallery, Firstsite, Newlyn Art Gallery,  Tate Modern, Bluecoat Liverpool, Amsterdam Light Festival, Radiator Berlin, IMMA Dublin, as well as receiving a variety of prizes and awards – most recently the Acme Studios Jonathan Harvey Tenant Award 25-6; she is currently Visiting Professor at De Montfort University, Leicester, and from 2012-21 was Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University.