HENNY LEES is SWERVE’s artist-in-residence for the SKIBBEREEN ARTS FESTIVAL in August 2025.

She is hosting an open studio on 2 and 3 August together with an artist’s café serving coffee and cakes, based on her artist café in London.

HENNY LEES is an artist who lives and works in London. Her work was featured in SWERVE 3 as part of an artist/writer collaboration with Cork poet KEMI GEORGE SIMPSON. Henny and Kemi worked together on a series of poems and images around the subject of their mothers, love and loss.

Henny says:

“I love colour and shape. The juxtaposition of certain colours delights me; there has to be a tension between the colours and a dialogue between the patterns. Sometimes it is about looking at objects and painting them at other times it becomes just about the colour and form in an abstract way, often using geometrical figures. This is influenced by the restrictions of knitting. I have knitted all my life, since my Gran taught me as a child.

I did a textile degree at Camberwell School of Art, many years ago. The grid of knitting lends itself to the geometric so that is always in the back of my mind but also trying to counter this by knitting shapes that resist straight lines, like spirals and circles.  Collage is a more immediate way of creating and is often influenced by found and saved paper, a habit inherited from parents who lived through World War 2 and hoarded everything.

I found working with the poet Kemi George Simpson exhilarating in a new way. Having an assignment, reacting to words in her poems, at a difficult time at the end of my mother’s life, when I might not have been making any work at all, was inspiring. I made abstract paintings about how Kemi’s work made me feel, but also some figurative portraits. It was a fresh way to create work, and Kemi would write poems inspired by our zoom conversations and the crocodile paintings that have been a constant theme throughout my creative life.”