V (Victoria Lees) is a multi-disciplinary artist who has a visual practice extending across sculpture, painting and drawing. She is based on Kuku Yalanji bubu in the Daintree Rainforest, Far North Queensland. V creates large-scale crochet and string installations suspended in space, forming open see-through mesh structures; fragile yet expansive forms that echo digital modelling while retaining their own organic rhythm.
A little ray of light in the darkness of the night. I wish upon this star, a little hope or joy. To bring to the sad, bored, dreary and unsuspecting a small morsel of magic and delight.
V was born in Victoria and traveled extensively with her geologist father and family in her youth, living in various locations in Australia, Zambia, England, Iran and Canada before settling in Sydney. She left school to study dance full time but on becoming a mother decided to pursue visual arts. She completed a Bachelor of Arts (Visual) in painting at the Australian National University School in 2002.
After completing a Master of Philosophy at the ANU in 2009 she found herself isolated on the margins of society and art world with a chronic illness which left her barely able to walk and barely to talk. During this time she turned to crochet. It was here, skating around on the fringes after she regained her ability to move that she began to explore making works in the environment. She decided the work had to be portable, flexible, minimal impact and made with inexpensive materials. It had to sit within its environment and create a relationship between the other elements and to herself moving within it. The work reuses materials, each time reimagined as its form is dependent on the environment and her relationship to it. The work is repetitive and process based, a celebration of her reclaimed physicality.
V emerged in underground festivals, where her ephemeral works were woven into the natural environment, that since expanded into site-specific projects and collaborations across Australia. Highlights include working on Yolŋu Country in East Arnhem Land, sharing dialogue on the cultural significance of string, and Vortibles at Curiocity Festival Brisbane, a collaboration with Sydney sound artist Rodney Berry, combining immersive crochet structures with ethereal soundscapes responsive to the environment.
Crochet, for V, is a meditative and generative process. Each stitch building upon the last, forming into rhythmic interconnected structures that echo everyday patterns, biological systems, and the invisible algorithms shaping contemporary life. V’s installations are temporary environments of interconnection between body, space and the intangible. Through repetition, movement, suspension and play V’s installations become rites of attention —moments to pause and reflect and reimagine our relationship with the world around us.
V is Director of Strange Charm Productions a company cofounded with her partner Gavin Findlay.
She is also president of cbfe.inc a small not for profit box of artists and creative misfits stretching across North and Far North Queensland and a member of the Diffraction Collective.
Victoria would like to acknowledge and pay my respects to Bama, the Kuku Yalanji people whose country she lives on and their ongoing connection to Bubu and Jalun. She would like to pay her respects to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this land and acknowledge their elders past present and emerging.
victoria lees 