Jeffrey T Y Lee

The various species of landscape composition in nature (after Alexander Cozens)

Jeffrey T Y Lee works across a range of disciplines but increasingly drawing and film have preoccupied his practice. T Y Lee’s interest in drawing, he explains, exists in the completeness of the act itself, which allows him to explore the incompleteness of memory and location. His work reflects on our understanding of place through our impact upon environments, social landscapes, or simply the passage of geological time.

For Margate Rocks 08, T Y Lee is working on a series of drawings based on a treatise by Alexander Cozens, the late 17th Century writer and artist, entitled ‘The Various Species of Landscape Composition in Nature’. The work was an attempt to reflect landscape ecology as a theoretical basis for nature in relation to 18th Century empirical epistemology. It existed to describe the various characteristics of nature and a systematic way of experiencing the enlightenment of nature. This discourse fascinates TY Lee, especially, he explains, “comparing it to our present time and how mankind continues to impact and intervene with nature”. Within this disruption he sees nature as ever-changing and incomprehensible, and we are reminded of this flux through his drawing; an unattainable motion reflected in fragments and marks.

_{Image: Jeffrey T Y Lee, Terrain Study, (detail) 2008, 23.5 x 51 cm, ink on paper, courtesy domobaal}