Malta artist Veronica Lee turns cracks into art: RAW exhibition celebrates island’s imperfect beauty

RAW: Artist Veronica Lee on the beauty of imperfection

In a sun-drenched studio overlooking Valletta’s Grand Harbour, Veronica Lee dips a cracked ceramic bowl into a basin of seawater she collected at dawn from Sliema’s shoreline. The bowl, once destined for a Żabbar charity-shop shelf, will become part of her new series “Kisses of the Sea”—a meditation on Malta’s eroding coastlines and the hairline fractures we carry in ourselves. “Perfection is a colonial hangover,” the 34-year-old artist laughs, brushing limestone dust from her hands. “The British wanted everything neat: grid streets, neat gardens, neat morals. I’m more interested in the chip on the rim, the place where the salt got in.”

Lee’s aesthetic rebellion arrives at a pivotal moment for the islands. As Valletta’s facades are sand-blasted to honey-coloured uniformity and Gozitan farmhouses are flipped into Airbnb minimalism, her solo show RAW—opening Friday at Splendid, the erstwhile Strait-Street jazz club turned grassroots gallery—asks Maltese audiences to reconsider what, exactly, is worth preserving. “We restore knights’ armour until it gleams, but we fill in the potholes with tar and forget the stories that made them,” she says, pointing to a canvas stitched from discarded fishing nets and yellowed Lino’s pastizzi wrappers. The work, titled “Qassata Heart,” bulges like a swollen sail; tiny glass beads—recycled from the Ta’ Qali craft village—glint where the pastry grease has eaten through the acrylic.

Malta’s craft tradition has long prized filigree perfection: the razor-sharp dovetail of a Maltese balcony, the symmetrical swirl of an ħaflija’s icing. Yet Lee, who studied at Kingston University before resettling in her nanna’s Birkirkara townhouse during the pandemic, finds poetry in the accident. “When the limestone steps outside my door flake, they reveal fossils of sea urchins older than the temples. That’s a dialogue, not a defect.” Her process mirrors the geology: she buries clay tablets in Għajn Tuffieħa clay for weeks, retrieving them encrusted with salt crystals and micro-plastics. The resulting textures become topographies for glaze, mapping human interference onto prehistoric beds.

The community is taking notice. Last month, Lee hosted free Saturday workshops for teenagers from St. Clare and St. Patrick’s colleges; together they crushed abandoned glass bottles from Paceville into frit, embedding the shards into clay tiles that will pave the gallery floor. “Kids who’ve never been inside an art space were suddenly experts on fracture patterns,” curator Romina Azzopardi recalls. “One girl said the tiles looked like her phone screen after she dropped it on the ferry—everyone laughed, then realised that’s the point: our breakages are autobiographical.” Proceeds from sold works will fund a summer art bus that will tour outer villages—Qrendi, Għargħur, Xewkija—collecting broken pottery and stories for a crowd-sourced sculpture to be unveiled during next year’s Valletta Cultural Festival.

RAW also wades into Malta’s environmental anxieties. A looming installation, “Azure Window, 2.0,” suspends 800 terracotta shards on fishing line, recreating the fallen arch in ghostly negative space. Each shard carries a QR code linking to a voice note from a local swimmer, diver, or boat captain recounting how the collapse altered their sense of identity. “We treated that limestone arch like a monument to permanence,” Lee reflects. “When it went, we mourned an Instagram prop. I want us to mourn the algae, the limpets, the underwater meadows that went with it—and to see that entropy can be generative.”

Critics might dismiss the show as Instagram-ready wabi-sabi, but Lee insists the stakes are higher than aesthetics. “We’re a nation addicted to filler: injecting concrete into every crack, smoothing over history with polyester render. If we can’t love the crack, we’ll keep covering it until nothing original breathes.” In that spirit, she has left parts of the Splendid’s crumbling plaster untouched, painting only a translucent wash that highlights the water stains left by decades of beer-soaked ceilidhs. The effect is startlingly intimate: history as blush.

As the opening night crowd sips pomegranate-and-prickly-pear cocktails, Lee invites them to snap their least favourite piece—then post it with the hashtag #imperfectlyMaltese. “I want to flood feeds with images that refuse the saturation slider, that insist on patina,” she says. Already, local photographers are sharing close-ups of rusted bus stops, flaking kiosk shutters, and the chipped enamel of the Gozo ferry’s railings. Each post is a quiet act of resistance against the glossy redevelopment renders that promise a frictionless future.

By midnight, the tiles laid by the teenagers gleam under fairy-lights, their embedded glass catching the same amber hue that once glistened on spilled whiskey when British sailors sang in the courtyard. Visitors hesitate to step on them—until Lee kicks off her sandals and walks across, grinding dust into the cracks. “See?” she grins. “Every footprint completes the work. Imperfection isn’t the end; it’s the invitation.”