Una Lee: The Oram Awards 2020
Una Lee is an artist working with sounds, stories and sensations, in perpetual pursuit of found sound and ways for alternative storytelling. She sings, narrates, writes and tells stories, improvises, collects field recordings and makes graphic artworks. She creates immersive compositions, and designs performances and intervention scenarios, live, fixed medium, or both. Many of her works, whilst being primarily sound-centred, incorporate interdisciplinary aspects such as performance art, visual art, literary art and theatre practice. She uses elements of storytelling and autobiographical inspiration to discuss subjects that affect most of us like the perception of time, the notion of memory, personal memories, the human condition, and ecology. She employs herself as an anthropological filter to highlight shared perspectives on life in an attempt to lessen the burden of others.
As a native of South Korea, she is based in the UK after coming to pursue higher education in sound-based arts. She has performed and exhibited in various places including Belfast, Dublin, London, Paris, Warsaw, Cologne, Zürich, Lisbon, Seoul and New York. She is the curator and director of spoken-voice-focused micro label ‘quills that whisper’. Currently she is working on ‘Songs to Stay Awake to’, for which she was granted the Oram award, a spoken song project in collaboration with Poetry Jukebox involving 9 poets from diverse backgrounds with their original poems chosen from an open call. Through this project she is exploring, rethinking and contemplating the notion of ‘song’.