leeharperart

It is what we do with the trials that befall us that determine who we are. With a lifetime of experience to draw upon – good, bad and sometimes painfully indifferent – Harper has dragged herself out of despair, turning the minutia of life’s experience into fuel for a dynamic and unfolding art practice that attests to her resolve and tenacity. Like the British artist, Tracey Emin, another intensely autographic artist, Harper lays aspects of her life bare and available for intimate scrutiny. This disclosure is simultaneously cathartic and reflective of a world that we can all recognise from time to time as disquietingly normal.

Coming to art from a non-arts background relatively late in life has given Harper the capacity to generate a mode of working that is free to cut across disciplines and find solutions in all manner of places. A lifetime of doubt, reflection, problem solving and generally dealing with the stuff of life is the preparation for her illuminating practice.

Dr Jane Deeth February 2013

Lee Harper’s background is ordinary in many respects – nothing too extreme but enough to generate the sense that nothing was ever too easy. Raised in a household with a mother, a sister and an absent father; locating to a working class suburb that did not fit the family’s expectations; always feeling the odd one out. This unsettling environment was tempered through her grandfather who, as a respected authority figure, established a positive role for the family within this alien space. The transition into teenage-hood aligned with a traumatic experience with scoliosis – a time spent either in pain-filled isolation or dealing with the cruel taunts of children afraid of her difference.

Apart from this time, Harper has worked more or less all her life, taking her responsibility for financial independence very seriously. When circumstances changed in the mid 2000s, the sense of betrayal was considerable. Shunned and silenced she found herself trapped in a spiral of criticism and judgement.

Top: Scoliotic Somoars 2011, human hair, cotton and steel. Above: Somoars 2011, shell, nylon and lacquer. Right: Somoar-Objects of Memory 2012 Sidespace Gallery, Hobart.

Left: Spinous Process 2012, Sawtooth Gallery, Launceston. Above: Somoars 2011, soap and human hair.

memory itself. Some of her objects fall into the realms of the abject, appearing oddly disembodied and beyond the realm of the self, the ‘‘something” that I do not recognise as a thing’2. Others occupy the space of the uncanny, things that appear familiar but on closer inspection become uncertain in origin and meaning.

The emphasis on the body in Lee’s work locates it within a tradition of art-making that approaches the body as a material resource for exploring the meanings of personal experience. Her works share similar autographic terrain as artists such as Hannah Wilke or Tracey Emin and the psychologically-infused works of Louise Bourgeois or Janine Antoni. Like these artists, her objects and processes create a field for understanding the ways in which our bodies become points of connection and disconnection, socially, philosophically and personally. As with much of this work, the tension in Lee’s works is built on an aesthetic that is both seductive and repelling. Her intimate surfaces and forms lure us with their materiality and the promise of connection whilst revealing the subtle workings of discomfort, anxiety or dread.

When we think of memory we often think of the workings of the psyche –its projections and reminiscences, or the strange spaces of repression, nostalgia or the uncanny. Such is the influence of psychology in our era that the way we think about memory owes much to the legacy of a subject defined by psychological as distinct from physical processes. In Lee Harper’s work, this dominance of the mind as the locus of memory is challenged by an aesthetic that recalls the body, its parts, operations, states and conditions. Referencing memories of her own embodied experiences, Lee’s objects suggest that memory cannot be contained within a psychological space, but has a material meaning of its own.

Stemming from a range of experiences, Lee’s work explores ideas of memory as an embodied form of knowledge. Through sculptural and conceptual processes, her works materialise memories of pain or anxiety in incomplete forms and assemblages, their loose threads and entrails evoking a sense of rupture or disassociation. In their fragility, there is a sense of something struggling to find form, a difficult development or perhaps just the uncertain condition of

1. Bergson, Henri 1910. Matter and Memory (New York, Zone Books 1991) p.102. Kristeva, Julia. ‘Approaching Abjection’ 1982. Oxford Literary Review(5) Nos. 1-2 p.126

‘All seems to take place as if, in this aggregate of images which I call the universe, nothing really new could happen except through the medium of certain particular images, the type of which is furnished me by my body.’ Henri Bergson1

memory, matter and meaning

In some works, particularly those about her experience of scoliosis, there is a painful quality that lingers within their affective range and recalls the primary difficulty of speaking about or representing pain’s effects. Physical pain as Elaine Scarry suggests is unrecountable, marked only by its destructive qualities and capacity to ‘unmake the world’ of the subject3. In the juxtapositions of malleable materials and hard surfaces of medical equipment and instruments, these works explore tensions between medicine’s inscription of the body, and pain’s interruptive potential in the realm of the subject and the challenge it presents to the continuity or coherence of identity.

In these and other works, Lee’s process seems less about revisiting the pain of the past, than of forging a connection with it, no matter how fragmented or incomplete. Their haptic quality evokes a sense of her turning these memories over in her hand and looking at their dimensions in the space of the self – something that perhaps can be done only in retrospect and with a measure of disembodiment. Despite the distancing effect of this process there is also a sense of recovery, a release in the confessionary ‘I’m

over it’ that relates not only to a painful undoing but also to the production of a new identity. Where the body may be recognised in her work as a site of disconnection or pain, it is also a site of re-connection, recalling Bergson’s ideas that it is the body that accumulates memories and our brain that turns these memories into images. As ‘the intersection of mind and matter’4 memory mingles with the imperative of art to make new images and to replenish its field.

The world of memory and the world of matter coexist in Lee’s work, forming an ongoing series of relationships between imperfect, partial forms marked in equal measure by vulnerability and strength. In these objects and images we find the body of a former self that still informs the present one – a body that lingers in the mind as residue or trace, and which cannot be forgotten.

Dr Eliza Burke February, 2013

3. Scarry, Elaine 1985 The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford University Press, Inc. New York)4. Bergson, Henri 1910. Matter and Memory (New York, Zone Books 1991) p.7

Left: Of myself Somoars 2011, human hair, mohair, doghair, feathers and silk.Above: Somoars 2011, silk, muslin, mohair and wool.

This project was assisted through Arts Tasmania by the Minister for the Arts

© 2013 The artist, authors and photographerISBN: 978-0-9875215-0-7Lee Harper art / introduction by Dr Jane Deeth; essay by Dr Eliza Burke; photographs by Richard Marks and courtesy of the artist.Design: Direct DesignPrinter: Foot and PlaystedCover: Hairsuit 2011, from the series Objects of Memory human hair, silk and muslin.

leeharper.com.au