BEHIND THE SCULPTURE

 

Newcastle-based artist Kelly-Ann Lees artfully manipulates heavy, manmade, scrap metal objects into light, whimsical forms inspired by nature. Lees majored in ceramics at Sydney College of the Arts in the late 1990s, before rediscovering a love of steel, a passion she first discovered in childhood. She recounts a delightful story of standing on her high school sports field, as a Hercules helicopter with an “enormous, angular, metal mass” hanging from its undercarriage, thundered overhead, as the first spark of her love affair with sculpture. Lees later discovered the work at a sculpture park on the Central Coast; the “metal mass” being a piece by Greg Johns, an artist who continues to inspire her to this day.
 

When asked why she moved the core medium of her artistic practice from ceramics to steel after leaving university, Lees listed three reasons; practicality -- the medium was affordable to an emerging artist; recycling -- scrap being an environmentally sustainable medium; and thirdly, she was intrinsically drawn to the material because of her ability to subvert the original function of the object. An example of this subversion of function can be seen in Lees’s work, Urchins, included in Sculpture by the Sea last year. The work consisted of hundreds of steel railway bolts welded together to create three, furry, organic sea urchins. The visually delicate work weighed literally over a ton....​​​​​