Another Beginning – We must be still and still moving

The title carries a phrase from T.S. Eliot's East Coker, the Four Quartets section in which he writes that we must be still and still moving, into another intensity, for a further union. A reductive woodcut is pulled in successive states from a single block that is progressively cut away between impressions; each color layer destroys the matrix's capacity to print the prior state, so the edition cannot be remade. That technical fact aligns with Lee's recurring interest in irreversible passage between two home countries, in which return is never to the same condition. The mulberry-paper substrate accepts dense overprinting while keeping a soft, fibrous surface in lighter passages. Within her practice the work belongs to a group of single-sheet prints that step away from her hundred-frame animation suites and compress the same problem of departure-and-return into one unrepeatable image.