Tau Lewis
Belly of the Abyss,2022 Reclaimed leather, vinyl, suede, fur, acrylic, paint, PVA glue, leather primer, wooden dowel and steel brackets
250 × 158,5 × 32 cm
About the work
For Belly of the Abyss (2022), Tau Lewis uses a striking combination of materials: reclaimed leather, vinyl, suede and fur, supplemented with acrylic, paint, glue, wood and steel.
The choice of reclaimed materials is essential to her artistic practice. Lewis creates sculptural portraits and quilts using materials that she finds, collects, receives as donations or recycles. She sources them from places including her immediate surroundings in Toronto and New York, as well as her family home in Negril, Jamaica.
Lewis describes her working method as an 'upcycling of a circumstance': not only materials, but circumstances themselves are, in a sense, given a new life.
In doing so, she situates her work within a long history of Black cultural production. She compares her approach to that of a hip-hop or jazz musician: existing material is sampled, recombined and placed in a different context.
Her creative process is particularly labour-intensive. Lewis is self-taught and uses techniques including hand-sewing, assemblage and direct carving. Everything is stitched by hand. The plaster components in her work are also carved by hand.
For Lewis, this manual work carries a special significance. She explains that sewing gives her a sense of softness. At the same time, she seeks to honour and continue diasporic making traditions: labour-intensive practices centred on recycling and the transfer of one's own energy into an object.
Lewis's portraits may refer to people from her immediate surroundings, but also to imagined ancestors. She regards these figures as 'celestial bodies' or talismans: spiritual connections between past, present and future.
Belly of the Abyss can also be viewed through the lens of this approach. Discarded and used materials do not disappear but are brought together again in a new form. Lewis therefore describes her practice as both recuperative and regenerative.
Tau Lewis
° 1993 in Toronto, Canada. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, United States.
The self-taught artist is known for her sculptures and assemblages, in which she frequently incorporates found and recycled materials.
Lewis has participated in numerous international group exhibitions, including Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican in London in 2024 and The Milk of Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022. She has also presented several solo exhibitions, including Spirit Level at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 2024 and a solo presentation at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami in 2023. In 2026, Kunstmuseum Brandts will present a solo exhibition of Tau Lewis's work.