Art Space Portsmouth is proud to present ‘Stories from Within’ - a solo exhibition of new paintings by London based artist Mindy Lee. This heartfelt body of work moves between everyday interactions, objects, dreams, daydreams, and memories of loved ones. Working with light stains of acrylic on transparent silk surfaces, Lee loosely depicts tales from her heart as momentary, open-ended encounters. The silks are stretched over an eclectic mix of small scale, reclaimed gold and silver frames, which act as a familiar domestic prop upon which an uncanny other world emerges.
This new body of paintings has evolved over the last couple of years. During this time Lee attended the Waking Consciousness Seminars (Kings College, London, 2022.) to further explore and develop a deeper understanding of what is means to be awake in relation to dreams, from the perspective of philosophy, art and science.
The paintings move through a pivotal chapter in the artist life that echo the ebb and flow of the past few years. At the start of the pandemic Lee’s mother died whilst the world emptied out – or retreated in. Her father also died at the start of 2023. Now the tide has turned and the otherness of the world overlaps and overwrites a quieter internal place in which to dwell with family ghosts. This series of works includes imagery that re-explores her personal experiences of motherhood, parenting, guardians, play, physio, family, death, absence, and a shifting sense of self.
Lee picks apart these intimate memories, fragmenting and dissolving figures, whilst allowing invisible and intangible elements to drift into focus. This diaristic style is intercut with references to mythological tales such as Ophelia, Narcissus, Orpheus and The Three Fates and Medusa. Layering the personal and mythological allows a myriad of new reflections to unfold, between reality and fantasy, individual and collective memories, the fleeting, and re-occurring. These strangely familiar scenarios invite the viewer to imprint their own stories upon the works.