Lee Mathers

180cm H x 120cm W x 80cm D
LED Fairy lights, monofilament and galwire

Exploring the dialectics of magic and melancholy through the use of fairy lights, I hope to create a temporal dislocation, initiating a psychic transition that proposes perception and consciousness as a transitional space between past, present and future.

The substance of light and shadow penetrate and play on the senses, unraveling the memories of other places into this place, this time. These small sparkly lights insinuate night but also tease and coax concepts of myth, magic and daydream from ones mind. The flayed unicorn is symbiotic of wish fulfilled but hope lost, an emptied container, flowing onto the floor into a spill of light.

100cm H x 300cm W
LED Fairy lights, monofilament & galwire

'Well, now that we have seen each other, 'the Unicorn said to Alice, 'if you'll believe in me, I'll believe in you. [1]

By toying with the conventional concept of time, Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, and what Alice found there explores preception and consciousness as a transitional space between past, present and future. The phrase I have adapted for this work encapsulates a conceptual thread that weaves it's way in, and out of themes within my creative practice.

[1] Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Vintage, Great Britain; 2007 (originally published in 1871)

Each mirror is 75cm H x 50cm W x 20cm D
Etched Black Mirror, Slumped plate glass, steel & mdf

Each print is 42cm H x 59cm W
Digital prints on Hahnemule Natural Cotton

40cm H x 30cm W x 35cm D (each light)
Hand blown glass, aluminium, incandescent light globes

Drawing on the industrial landscape, this work makes humorous analogies between objects functions and processes with the human conditions capability to not only exist but flourish in the face of adversity.

Down Lights, an oversize pair of glass light bulbs, appear to have dropped from the ceiling to the floor. However, despite the Down Lights unfortunate circumstances, they persist to shine light on a seemingly dismal situation. 

125cm H x 100cm W x 20cm D
Digital video projection, incandescent light globes, black ink

40cm H x 105cm W x 7cm D
Etched plate glass, acrylic mirror, indian ink, mdf

100cm H x 450cm W x 5cm D
LED fairy lights, galvanised wire, monofilament

(Source: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury. Penguin Books, USA; 1931, p.43)

45cm H x 20cm W x 8cm D
LED globes, glass, dandelion pods, ink, sterling silver tubing and copper wire

Dimensions variable (approx 200cm H x 150cm W)
LED fairy lights, found pressed glass ashtrays and plates, galvanised wire and monofilament

'I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night' Galilei Galileo

Constructed immersive installation space

Dimension variable - 240cm H x 800cm W x 1000cm D (approx)
Cast and blown glass compasses, sound, light and timber

‘The Galileo Project’ is an interactive installation work exploring the possibility of relinquishing ones self to be absorbed by darkness. To find an exit point through an immersive darkened space, the participant uses 24cm diameter phosphorescent glow in the dark glass compasses as navigation instruments. The completely black space had two entry/exits areas aligned at adjacent magnetic axis points, one being north and the other south, forcing the participant to navigate the full length of the space to find their way out. Within the space there were a series of four phantom doors emitting low-level lighting that gave the illusion of a door left slightly ajar with a light on in an adjacent room, whilst the real exits were concealed with a double black curtain. The space was also immersed in surround sound of electro-magnetic static pulses.

Symbolic associations of darkness are loaded with socially imbued politics of anxiety, power, fear and death. In opposition to light, contexts of darkness, particularly that of lived spaces, are correlated with the unknown. If there is no illuminating light then darkness absorbs the objects within space and visual perception is either obscured or completely disabled. In a society that has placed primary importance on seeing above all other of the body senses the inability to see invokes a state of uncertainty and anxiety for some individuals.

This work explores psychological reactions of being immersed and absorbed by darkness. In this space light will mislead you inverting the supremacy of light over darkness as a mechanism of power.

I believe this work is symptomatic of the psychological, spatial and time rupture that exists within histories, both personal and social, language and perception.

20cm H x 49cm D
Blown and cast glass, silver leaf, copper with kauri pine base

16cm H x 133cm W x 3.5cm D
Fused and enamelled glass

18cm H x 35cm W x 3cm D
Fused, slumped and enamelled glass, wooden frames

35cm Diameter x 5cm Deep
Slumped and enamelled glass, aluminium

17cm H x 73cm W x 7cm D (each)
Fused, slumped and enamelled glass

Full title: Lightly Shadowed, Wakeful Sleeping, Whispered Screaming, Laughing Crying, Living Dying

130cm H x 120cm W x 95.7 D
Site specific installation
Cast lead crystal, brorosilicate tubing, steel and lights

50cm H x 70cm W x 20cm D
sub-surface laser etched optical glass, cast and lampworked glass

37cm H x 80cm W x 15..6cm D
sub-surface laser etched optical glass, copper taps