Penny Lee

Blister in the Sun

Artist Name (as they wish to display): Penny Lee

2026 

Medium: Hand stained Porcelain, rainwater & glaze

Price: $185

Artwork Description: 

Blister in the Sun comes out of the hours between first light and the rituals of a morning at home, when the body’s clock and the arrival of daylight run into each other. I’m interested in the sun as one of the oldest images we have. Across nearly every culture and period it has been worshipped, feared, drawn, carved and turned into a god. It’s a figure as much as a star.

I work with porcelain quickly and by hand. I stain it, press it into my palm, then pinch, fold and push it until something unruly appears. I’m not after a polished or idealised sun. I want one that’s lumpy, raw and alive, with every gesture and fingerprint left on the surface. Clay keeps a record of touch, and in that sense these works are as much about memory as about form.

For me the sun is tied to home and childhood. It gives warmth, rhythm and life, and it also blisters and burns. I grew up on the Newcastle beaches, basking and burning, and that was my childhood and my sense of home. This sculpture sits in that double space, part devotion and part warning, part seduction and part sting. They’re small idols to something that both holds us and hurts us.