Una Lee: Women Make Music
Preserving a flower-garden in shape of music alongside bi-lingual poetry
Una’s upcoming work ‘po(e)sies’ is an attempt to let a flower-garden migrate across space and poetry across time. It reincarnates the Korean ancient mystic poetry/song form Hyangga (meaning ‘home-song’), which died out a millennium ago, and adapts its era-specific bi-lingual reading and writing system into English. Una will transfigure the blossoming calendar from a faraway flower-garden into a musical score, recounting a tragic life of an elderly woman and her solitary garden. She is composing this work to be performed by herself and Landless, the highly sought-after, all-female, cross-border-Irish vocal quartet, usually known for their close-harmony work of traditional Irish songs. They will together create this ethereal performance about fusing – of times, traditions, musical practices and languages, and offer reconciliation amidst our era of many conflicts.
Una Lee is an artist of sounds, stories and sensations, in perpetual pursuit of alternative storytelling. She seeks innovation in the contemporary marriage between performance and poetry, exploring human condition, memory, time, and our relationship with art and ecology, often drawing from her autobiographical events and her present identity as non-native in her habitat. She is a member of experimental group ‘HIVE Choir’, part of the duo ‘OULAN’, and co-director of the micro-label ‘quills that whisper’. She is an Ivor Novello Composers Award nominee in 2022 and Oram Awards recipient from 2020.