Installation shot of work by Tau Lewis at The Hepworth Wakefield

This presentation by Tau Lewis (b. 1993, Toronto) marks the artist’s first exhibition outside North America. It brings together recent works in this gallery with an installation specially commissioned for this exhibition, shown in the adjacent gallery.

At the heart of the new installation hangs a large-scale quilt, The Coral Reef Preservation Society, which takes its title from a painting of the Negril coral reef in Jamaica that hung as a print on the wall of the artists childhood home. Its depiction of aquatic life forms became a reference point for a new body of work, in which Lewis uses myth making to reanimate the history of loss that was the Middle Passage.

‘The whole point is to focus on life, and new life at that. The water holds the information. I have a fantasy wherein all of the millions of slave people who entered the ocean during the middle passage were swallowed up by the ocean floor and spat out as other-worldly aquatic beings. I like to believe that the beauty of the ever-evolving, ever-expansive ocean is in part created by or inspired by the presence of ancestors, and that the vast amounts of cultural information which would have been compromised at sea were absorbed and translated by the aquatic ecosystem.’

For Lewis, objects hold particular frequencies and energies, histories and memories. The works in this presentation have been made from discarded or donated textiles that the artist has collected in a suitcase while passing through different places. Lewis has visited the island’s western coastline regularly since childhood, gathering shells, bone and glass from the seashore. This act of assembling and repurposing materials is one in which care for the environment is combined with honouring relationships to the past.

Find out more about the artist by listening to our audio guide at bit.ly/ysi-thw6

Courtesy the artist and The Hepworth Wakefield. Photo: Nick Singleton