Acme Studios — Rona Lee

Supporting Artists since 1972


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.

"The Jonathan Harvey Tenant Award will allow me to take stock, experiment with new media and approaches and build new networks and contexts for my practice. Working from photo book plates from the post war period of ‘The Great Acceleration', at time which witnessed unprecedented growth in global socio-economic systems, I will use collage, excision, screen and digital over printing to critically examine ideas of Race/Nature, Reason/Order, embedded within them. I will also be revisiting the engagement with performance that characterised my early work. Input from curators, writers and gallerists will assist me to consider the arc of my practice since the 1980s and the ways in which it might evolve and continue."

- Rona Lee

www.ronalee.org
@ronaleeartist

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.