Rona Lee
Jonathan Harvey Tenant Award
2025
Rona Lee is a London-based artist, with an expanded practice of some 40 years that encompasses performance, photography, sculpture, video and found objects. Her research-led work frequently explores ways of disrupting patriarchal/imperial power structures, such as scientific rationalism. Lee’s recent work has focused on the human/more-than-human entanglements of contemporary life.
She has received a wide variety of awards and grants and made work for numerous galleries (Beaconsfield, John Hansard, Newlyn Art Gallery, Firstsite, Dilston Grove, Bluecoat) and public sites (William Wilberforce Museum, National Oceanography Centre, St Thomas Hospital) in the UK and internationally (Germany, Holland, Norway, Canada, USA and Ireland). Recent exhibitions include ‘mineralis insurrexi’, Worlds Away, MAC, Birmingham and ‘A Modern Lapidary’ and ‘An Extractive Index’, Lithic Entanglements, Sedgwick Museum of Earth Science, Cambridge.
Lee has also published on the capacity of artistic practice to support new forms of critical thinking (‘In Love with the Lithosphere’, Postcards from the Anthropocene - Unsettling the Geo-Politics of representation. Barcelona: DPR 2019), ‘Truthing Gap - imagining a relational geography of the uninhabitable’, Emerging Landscapes Between Production and Representation London: Ashgate 2013). She is currently chair of the advisory board of Artquest, an ACE national portfolio organisation, which works to support professional artists across their careers.
Jonathan Harvey Tenant Award
As part of Acme’s commitment to provide transformational support for artists at all stages of their career, this award recognises Acme artist tenants who have made a long-term commitment to their arts practice. Named in honour of Acme’s Co-Founder Jonathan Harvey OBE, the award offers an artist fee of £5,000 and financial support towards the facilitation of the successful project up to a maximum of £7,000.