© LeeHassall, The Gift, 2012. Photo Henry Chan.
Lee Hassall is a Senior Lecturer and joint course leader in Fine Art at the University of Worcester. He has shown installation, film and performance work nationally and internationally. He studied at The Slade School of Fine Art (BA Hons Sculpture) and at Chelsea School of Art & Design (MA Fine Art). Lee is currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at the University of Aberystwyth, in the Department of Theatre, Film & Television. His starting point for his research is a set of drawings by Thomas Rowlandson made during a tour of Wales in 1797. The main focus of the enquiry is emptiness in relation to the sublime, with thesis chapters on: ‘the sublime’; ‘landscape’; ‘the picturesque site’; and ‘post-colonial absences’. His research proposes reclaiming a sense of the visual within the study of landscape and explores and contextualizes the articulation of the visual in relation to the performative; in part by examining how the figural and two-dimensional are articulated and translated into performances. The underlying aim of the research is to widen the discourse that surrounds performing and inhabiting landscape. Outcomes will be a set of artworks and a developing written thesis whose form will allow for ruptures, breaks and schisms and which, with its jump-cuts and propensity towards montage, transgresses the teleology of conventional academic discourse.
