Artist
Lee Hassall

© Lee Hassall, 2012. Photo Henry Chan.

UK
www.leehassall.org

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.

Performance
The Gift by Lee Hassall

Is art torn between the commodity and the gift, the supermarket and the church?

Lee Hassall will use the gallery as a repository and home base from which to engage with the surrounding neighbourhood, gathering impressions via exchanges with objects, paraphernalia and people, culminating in a final performance action.

For two days, audience is invited to the gallery to witness the growing installation and to donate a gift for the artist. Donated items or materials may be altered, deconstructed, disappeared or hybridized. All gifts will be considered and engaged with and will become a part of the final public performance.

SCHEDULE
March 14: performance-installation in progress @ 6:00pm–8:00pm
March 15: Artist talk in gallery @ 6:00pm
March 16: Final performance @ 8:00pm

© Lee Hassall, The Gift, 2012. Photo Henry Chan.

Performance Yellow

This fragrance opens us to the question, has the show started? It's winter, the theatre is colder than the street and the room is filled with people and all their winter smells: wet faux leather, down, too much shampoo, and beer breath. The atmosphere is a trickster. Am I late, am I early?

Top Notes

yellow mandarin, mimosa

Middle Notes

honey, chamomile, salt

Base Notes

narcissus, guaiac wood, piss, beer