"Sing a song of sixpence, / a pocket full of rye. / Four and twenty blackbirds / baked in a pie...” goes the nursery rhyme visualized here by Ed Bing Lee. The origins and meaning of this rhyme are opaque, though pies containing live songbirds were occasional amusements at sixteenth-century dinner parties. So noted, Four and Twenty is part of Lee’s “Delectable Series,” which playfully depicts food as soft sculpture. The artist compares his process of working with thousands of knots to the pointillist paintings of Georges Seurat, who built his forms through the repetition of small, dot-like brushstrokes. Lee remarks, “I continually return to art history for visual and conceptual stimulation. For me, it is the perfect jumping off point for work in a technique that knows no boundaries.”
Drawn by the immediacy of the process and the satisfaction of an art form that is reliant on meticulous handwork, Lee has perfected his painstaking knotting practice over a career spanning four decades. He began as a commercial fabric designer in New York and Philadelphia, and later became the head of the design department at Craftex Mills. Lee later taught at Moore College of Art and Design, the University of the Arts, and the Art Institute of Philadelphia. He is the recipient of numerous awards, including a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowship, a Farelli Award for Excellence in Fiber, and a Pew Fellowship in Crafts. His work has been exhibited nationally and is in the collections of Woodmere, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Daphne Farago Fiber Arts Collection, and the Franklin Mint in Los Angeles.
