A Map is Not the Territory, 2021
Sandra Eula Lee is a multidisciplinary artist who employs a range of unconventional artistic processes to pose questions about form and materiality. Her works use raw elemental materials, which she transforms through a series of deliberative steps. As if she were performing a science experiment, these materials are combined then burned in kilns, smashed together, or otherwise manipulated into a range of creative artifacts.
Many of her works tend to conflate an end-product with the basic components that comprise something. In her work Ash (2021), she begins with over a hundred square terracotta panels which are kiln fired with various mixes of sodium bicarbonate and copper imposed upon them. Changing the recipe on each panel, some result in a carbon black patina while others end up ash white. Varying the thickness of time in the kiln means some panels are encrusted with a rust-red patina, akin to Martian moonscapes. This is heightened as parts are arranged into a pixelated matrix on the floor. The final layout evokes an overhead navigational satellite photography, with images stitched together.
In her work Electronics Garden / Slow Burn (2021), colorful wire from discarded and smashed electronic components is wrapped around petrified wood and various minerals. Visibly at the center of these works, Lee has placed chunks of cassiterite, bauxite, sphalerite, chalcopyrite (the rocks and minerals from which we get tin, aluminum, zinc, and copper). Making the micro, macro, the artist is manipulating scale, resulting in forms that resemble teaching models of novel atomic structures. like an applied citizen-scientist sharing her data, Lee seems to be inviting us to reconsider the environmental costs of our built environment.