Iconic American writer Joan Didion once said, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live.”
For Folly Beach-based sculpture artist Annie Rhodes Lee, investigating the stories we tell is crucial and almost compulsive. Her works, which employ clay expertly disguised as concrete, intricate wood carvings of animals and humans, porcelain, natural materials and textured papers, are embedded with rich narratives in response to her observations of human nature, culture and spirituality. She often works from dreams and is frequently inspired by literature.
“I’ve always had a narrative bent,” she said. “Growing up in the South, it was very obvious that there’s this pastoral portrait that exists — for example, Alice Ravenel Huger Smith, which I adore. But this pastoral portrait is really a narrative that does not connect to the reality of this place.”
And so making work from a place of questioning and playing with narratives became a fixation, “and how cultures are formed; how we write them into existence to a large degree.”
She works out of a sunny studio overlooking the lush scenery of Folly Beach. It’s detached from the main house and contains a kiln, dozens of works in different states of completion, and a balcony for birdwatching. Preserved lizards and cicadas hang on a wall in the bathroom, pointing to her deep reverence for nature and our connectedness to it: “We are nature. I do not believe we are outside of it,” she said.
She listens to audiobooks while she works and takes inspiration from an impressive catalog of art books, looking at Bosch, Escher, Michelangelo’s fascinating slave sculptures and Anselm Kiefer’s complicated watercolors.
Though born in Summerville, Lee spent most of her life in New York City. Just after graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University’s school of art, she moved north of the Mason-Dixon line to immerse herself in art and culture. Ten years ago, Lee moved back to the Lowcountry. She misses the Big Apple (and visits often to feed her cultural appetite), but being home means more specific access to the complexities she confronts in her work — race, history and culture.
Driven by curiosity
Lee’s insatiable curiosity drives her to do things like spend hours riding the subway drawing people, experimenting with materials and composition to describe the complicated layers of personality and perception.
“I would get in a subway and just ride and ride and ride, drawing people. And then I would get home and I would imagine what I thought they were thinking.” Looking at the project on her website, called “Notes from the Underground,” (a Dostoevsky reference) one can’t help but wonder, how much of this portrait is informed by Lee’s imagination? How much comes from the sitter’s openness, or lack thereof? How much is informed by where they are coming from or going?
“We have this impulse to narrate things into being,” Lee said. “We see someone who looks down, and we go, oh no, they’re fine. They’re happy the way they are. We don’t really look at the layers underneath and why we’re telling ourselves those stories.”
Growing up, Lee spent a lot of time in the woods, resulting in a deep appreciation for wood, one of her favorite materials to manipulate — her family is in the timber business, and her mother worked in the family’s lumber mill on McLeod Mill Road her entire life.
Like wood, each of Lee’s works has its own distinct rhythm and flow, created in response to the material, and often pulls together many smaller spheres within one work. The way she activates color, form and material assists in her telling stories and asking big questions. For example, a recent drawing on the studio wall shows a face split in half — one eye and one half of the nose and mouth are Lee’s, the other side, a Haitian friend with a darker skin tone.
“I used a brown paper for her and a light paper for me, but I used the same pastels for both portraits. So the colors were going to be affected by our backgrounds, regardless that our perspectives were similar. … It communicated about that depth of background in a literal and figurative sense.”
That kind of storytelling through materiality is the throughline that exists in each of Lee’s diverse-looking works: complex and vast drawings on textured papers; a stack of crumbling concrete blocks with figurative details you must see to believe; a sculpture called “Time and Tide,” which is comprised of segmented sections of porcelain, wood and clay with eye-level eyes staring back at you. (You can even find a reflection of yourself painted in the irises.)
Telling stories of people on the move
A spirit of collectivism is perhaps one of the most intriguing and endearing qualities of Lee’s work. Her figures often call to mind themes of migration on both personal and historical scales, like the snow-globe-esque sculpture “The Things They Carry With Us” (above) which describes, Lee said, “a woman with a landscape moving through her [to talk about] the courage it takes to migrate — the things you have to carry with you and the things you leave behind.”
Rubble and concrete blocks are a common motif for Lee, sometimes stacked one on top of another. “It can either be like a partition or protection. It can be used to define a boundary, or it’s going to crumble and be destroyed. I started using it for its metaphorical content.”
One of the first times she incorporated the concrete motif was in the ceramic work titled “A Dwelling in the Evening Air.” Here, unlike other works where the figures rise above or are crushed within the concrete, the four faces look directly at one another, each painted like a purple-hued sky after the sun has just set, each eye twinkling slightly.
And on the outside edges of the work, cave paintings, inspired by a moving experience Lee had in Dordogne, in the south of France, where she visited prehistoric cave paintings in the Vézère Valley.
“You go in and everything smells like prehistory. … Looking at these cave paintings is an epiphany [that makes you think] what are we fighting about? We’re all one people.”
The work inspired by this experience is aptly named for a Wallace Stevens poem called “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour.”
“There’s a line in it, ‘we make a dwelling in the evening air, in which being there together is enough.’ It’s nice to think that in all this rubble and contention, where things are broken apart, that there’s a dwelling in the evening air where we look at each other; we’re forced to look at each other to put the cube back together.”
Help keep the City Paper free.
No paywalls.
No subscription cost.
Free delivery at 800 locations.
Help support independent journalism by donating today.