About
Nicholas Lees studied Ceramics at the University of the West of England (BA) and University of Wales Institute, Cardiff (MA), having previously also studied English and History at the University of Kent (BA). In 2012 he completed an MPhil by project at the Royal College of Art in London.
His work has been exhibited widely in the UK and overseas and is held in private and public collections including the V&A, York City Art Gallery, Fitzwilliam Museum, Westerwald Keramikmuseum in Germany and the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche in Faenza. He has won several awards including the Cersaie prize at the Faenza Biennale in Italy in 2015, the National Sculpture Award from the Bluecoat Display Centre in Liverpool in 2010 and the Desmond Preston Prize for Excellence in Drawing at the Royal College of Art in 2012. He has made a significant contribution to higher education in the UK, as a Senior Lecturer at Bath Spa University between 2000 and 2010 and as a visiting lecturer on Postgraduate courses at Bath, The Royal College of Art and UCA Farnham since 2010. He lives and works in Hampshire, UK.
He makes sculpture from porcelain and works on paper, with an approach that is rooted in knowledge of materials and process and of thinking through making.
His current work is about perception: exploring an interest in the ephemerality and uncertainty of perception and the manner in which our visual experience of reality is conditional upon light, space and body. This body of work originates in an attempt to manifest qualities of shadows as representations of the hinterland between two and three dimensions and between presence and absence, so making a material penumbra. These ideas are also informed by a lifetime of looking at the same stretch of Scottish coastline, bringing the realisation that the constant shift of tide, weather and light mean the experience of perception is forever transient.