Mire Lee’s promethean sculptures and installations instill a creeping transgressive horror. Twisted piles of rubber tubing, pools of silicate, and ventricular pumps gurn, and ejaculate. Hung like sides of meat in an abattoir, or writhing slowly on the ground, they elicit disgust, desire, and curiously, maternal tenderness. There is no sense of healthy growth, rather each is an entropic system. They devour themselves as the exhibition progresses, hard mechanics grind down soft material. The process that leads her to the form of each is instinctive and bodily, driven by material qualities, and a desire to avoid the clean lines of ‘art.’ Instead she develops an aesthetic of excess and overdrive, creating encounters that are profoundly affective, speaking to the grim human fascination with the roadside crash. To encounter her work in the gallery space is to be confronted with a disintegrating simulacrum of our own frail flesh. As the viewer, the distance between the work and ourselves collapses; one body viscerally responding to another.
Having been consumed by comics and fan art as a teenager, Lee became a skilled draughtsman, producing neat line drawings. Her subsequent practice as an artist is a marked attempt to destroy this neatness. Discovering motors and mechanical processes gave her a pathway into a new way of making that left much to accident and discovery. Her works have grown from loose assemblages lying on the ground to complex interrelated mechanical figures linked by pumps and veins of liquids. The process of making each sees Lee battle with her materials. They are slippery, large-scale, and teeter on being beyond her control. Fluids slop over pristine museum floors, and mechanical parts truculently break down. Lee risks being swallowed by the work. A self-proclaimed anxious maker, there is a method in her being engulfed by the task at hand, losing herself in material demands.
—Natasha Hoare
