Henry Lees | Artist at Mondoir

Nationality: British

Discipline: mixed-media

Based in: Leicester, GB

Biography

Henry is an artist that uses gears and other semi-autonomous systems to create hand-crafted generative art, working primarily with ink, pencil, pastel, bubbles and watercolour. Experimenting with both traditional and digital mediums for approximately 15 years, Henry’s first interest was portraiture. It was late 2021 when he reintroduced himself to a basic spirograph set. Drawing with gears married Henry’s passion for the tactile process of drawing and painting with his love for the emergent surprises inherent in generative art. Since then, he has amassed a large collection of gears and developed further techniques to utilise autonomous and semi-autonomous systems in novel ways to create visual art.

Artist Statement

Moments of subjectivity and randomness are introduced into typically rigid systems to ensure each piece is unique, while consciously maintaining a distinct aesthetic that immediately communicates a foundation of rule based systems. His works are presented as analogues to archaeological finds - not in their materiality, but in their capacity to evoke an embedded history and cultural significance, through a process led heavily by organic discovery and emergence.

Exhibitions

NFT Liverpool 2022 Adelia Gallery LSA Annual Exhibition 2022, 2023, 2025, 2026 Newarke Museum, SOCK Gallery, Leicester Museum and Art Gallery Tarpey Gallery Open 2023, 2024, 2025 Tarpey Gallery Royal Birmingham Society of Artists Drawing Prize Exhibition 2023, 2025 RBSA Gallery

Awards

N/A

Education

I have no formal training. I am a current member of Leicester Society of Artists and involved heavily with local art societies, giving seminars, workshops and exhibitions in traditional formats. I have created and maintained a newsletter 'Autonomous Souls' which celebrates crafts people and artists creating generative art and objects with analogue methods. I am very passionate about craft and making. My education has been that of self-learning and research, primarily of traditional crafts where generative principles are leveraged, or underpin a visual language. My main sources of inspiration comes from researching traditional crafts and pattern making e.g. Japanese maki-e / lacquer works, maori wood carvings, islamic geometry etc. all of which heavily informs my mindset when drawing.

Henry Lees | Artist at Mondoir

Biography

Artist Statement

Exhibitions

Awards

Education

Artworks by Henry Lees

Into the Voids

Sunset

Soft Light

Take me to your Leader

The Monk