Hannah Lees has produced a body of work exploring ideas of motherhood and the depletion of the body. The works span a period of three years and document a journey from failed conception to pregnancy and motherhood.
The parallels between Lees’ ageing teeth and her son’s emerging milk teeth can be seen in the artwork of mounted gold & silver dental crowns, one of which mirroring the “O” in the exhibition title and also of an utterance: “Oh”.
Her kinship with Giant Pacific Octopus, who slowly die caring for their eggs in their nursery/tomb, can be seen in the purposely low-resolution digital depictions of hanging octopus eggs; the grey glitchy block-out has removed the trace of the octopus mother and the cave leaving just the thriving eggs. The plaster-cast coconuts act as metaphors for Lees’ “eggs”. There are signs of negligence with bad eggs nestled among the groups.
The embroidered hospital curtain and hospital screen signal the many hospital visits for fertility issues, during pregnancy scans, the birth and after with her son. The design based on filling in the blank areas left from botanical dyeing, which also acts as a metaphor for a phrase Lees’ husband used when acknowledging her mental health: “stop filling in the blanks”. The laborious stitching done during the loneliness and monotony of child-rearing, also felt in the VHS tape works, knitted while watching the old TV series’.
The audio work “I don’t know anymore what I am” sampled from Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” and remixed by Dul Fin Wah (Sam Slattery) re-examines ideas of sounds entering in-vitro, and what is remembered.
The title is taken from the Folio version of Hamlet published in 1623 after Shakespeare's own death, where Hamlet’s silence is followed by another line, or rather half line, made up of a single repeated syllable: 'The rest is silence. O, o, o, o'.
Hannah Lees
(b. 1983, Kent, UK; Lives & Works in Margate, UK) Hannah Lees’ work investigates ideas of cycles, constancy and mortality; the sense that things come to an end and the potential for new beginnings. She completed a Post-Graduate Diploma at Chelsea College of Art, London, UK (2011) and completed a Foundry Residency at the Royal College of Art, London, UK (2012). In 2018 she was awarded the Gasworks Triangle Network Fellowship Residency at Pivo, Sao Paulo, Brazil and the British Council ID/UK Exchange Residency to Java, Indonesia.
Previous Exhibitions: Arusha gallery, London, UK (group); French Riviera 1988, London, UK (group); Collective Ending, London, UK (group); La Centrale, Auvergne-Rhone-Alps, FR (solo); Kupfer Project Space, London, UK (group); Kingsgate Project Space, London, UK (solo); ltd los angeles, Los Angeles, US (group); VITRINE, Basel, CH (group); 650mah, Hove, Brighton, UK (group); The approach, London, UK (group); Seventeen gallery, London, UK (group); The Sunday Painter, London, UK (solo);
Current & Forthcoming: Turner Contemporary, Margate, UK (group); Salome Salmacis, London, UK (group); Brockley Gardens, London, UK (solo); Well Projects, Margate, UK (solo); Tillingham Vineyards, Sussex, UK (solo); The Road, Florence, IT (solo).
