SACHA LEES: [UN]BECOMING

The body is everywhere in Sacha Lees’ [Un]becoming. Fragmented and partial, the human form is present in the profusion of limbs straining against the dynamism of her painted surfaces. In Threshold, a solitary hand extends upwards from a tumultuous swirl of fabric. Around the painting’s edge we catch a glimpse of another hand, the blurring arc of an arm in motion, a foot thrown upwards. It is impossible, though, to resolve these fragmentary parts into a coherent, singular whole. Across [Un]becoming the human body itself appears to be coming undone. 

Painted upon unexpected surfaces – the luminescent soft glow of copper, the linear unravelling of measuring tapes – these bodies swirl in a continual refusal of visibility, entangled in fabric that seems to take on its own robust form as it pulses with motion. Painted in the jewel-bright pure tones of a Baroque-inflected colour palette, the drapery seems illuminated from within. The lush richness of oil paint as it has been layered onto the metallic sheen of copper evokes a long European tradition of religious iconography – there is reverence in these paintings. This reverence is enhanced further still by the swathes of lapis blue fabric which echo from painting to painting. Marian blue, it is a colour synonymous, in Western art history, with depictions of the Virgin Mary. Here is a woman more icon than human. A woman rendered again and again in word and paint, burdened by the weight of iconographic referentiality.  

But this, too, is Kristeva’s blue – luminous and insatiable. It is the colour of excess, of bodily sensation, of unruly pleasure.  

Underpinned by a sharp feminist criticality, Lees’ painterly eye is attuned to the weight of women’s representation as it thunders down towards us from throughout arts histories. In [Un]becoming, she works to distort the representative frame that has long sought to contain and constrain women: we see paintings arrested within their own process of (un)becoming. Pigments scatter like sediment, and lustrous strata of paint give way to colour that appears to scumble towards disintegration. The images seem to devour themselves as they bleed further from the forms to which they were once bound. 

In Selvedge, Bias and Draw, this distortion is literal and material. To create these paintings, Lees has manipulated tape measures to create both substrate and image, binding them together with an intricacy that splinters the painted form. The rigid logic of the measuring device asserts itself in the march of numbers still visible beneath thin layers of paint. The numbers speak to the ways women are measured and found wanting. They speak to the ways women are measured and found to be too much: too hungry, too desirous, too bodily. These paintings refute such limits. Here, bodies refuse to adhere; they refuse to yield to legibility. Here, we see the body becoming unbound, unruly. [Un]becoming. 

By Kirsty Baker