Lees, Sacha. “Golden Veil, Rotten Core III.” 2024, Salt, vinegar, ammonia, paper and oil on a reclaimed copper-clad laminate, 900 mm x 1200 mm
Lees, Sacha. “Cassandra.” 2024, Salt, vinegar, corn flour and oil on eight sheets of reclaimed copper-clad laminate, 4770 mm x 2500 mm
Master of Fine Arts
Sacha Lees is a contemporary fine artist based in Pōneke. Her work provokes an uncomfortable and intimate conversation around gendered hierarchies. Lees folds in classical techniques to depict an internal battle, creating a feminist bildungsroman. Her war stories and ecological concerns convey an awakening of her voice and body. The large-scale work Cassandra captures a self in flux towards critical feminist identity; or better still, “feminists need to look inside themselves to see what tyrants reside there" (Dawson). Lees's residual corporeal anxiety, executed with 17th-century baroque painting practices, means that forms are restrained or exert themselves against consumer culture. Cassandra is a surreal push me/pull you mechanism sucking you down into Lees’s maestromic yearning for escape.