Lewis’s origins are originary, by which I mean they aren’t fixed, and can’t be: her origins move. After all, recycling, a mode to which Lewis is wed, is a cycle, a renewal of what would otherwise be thrown away, left behind or forgotten. Together, Lewis and the artists who come before and alongside her build an improvisational repository for what cannot or will not be said, an intimate evidence of the “we” from which we came, evidence that there is a “we” to begin with, and that it starts with counter-hegemonic Black creative practice.
In Lewisian fashion, with and because of Lewis, I have here compiled a small chorus of Lewis’s actual and potential co-conspirators to show some of the many lineages her work follows. Through what Holley has called “furious curiosity and biological necessity,” these artists twist circumstance and constraint to make something other than what is. This incomplete list is something like what Tonika Sealy Thompson and Stefano Harney call, following historian Walter Rodney, groundations, that particularly Caribbean mode of rigorous study of shared roots. “In the Caribbean roots do not go just into the earth,” Sealy Thompson and Harney write. “They grow out of it, radiating outwards in waves and coming to our shores in waves, in what the Barbadian poet Edward Kamau Brathwaite calls tidalectics.” Lewis makes me wonder: How are roots made through processes of dispersion, scavenging, collecting and foraging?
As with Brathwaite, Lewis’s concern is also Afro-diasporic: those Black aquatic geographies (the ocean, the sea), the instability of water’s flow, the nowness of the Middle Passage: Her Soul of the sea (2019) erodes a species divide. In Water flooded out of my heart pocket (2019), shades of denim and leather make up the oceanic and give it flesh. In What in the water? (time capsule #3) (2018), water is personified, a body of plaster, cloth, acrylic paint, foam sealant and “secret objects.” And there is the large, hand-stitched tapestry The Coral Reef Preservation Society (2019), with its jagged edges, coral growths, seahorses and cephalopods. Quilting is a rich Afro-diasporic tradition, an art of the world historical. The word “tradition” does not quite cut it because quilting is tectonic: historically significant, large-scale, constructional, processual. Its title referencing a print that hung in Lewis’s family’s home and depicted the coral reefs, fish and other sea creatures of Negril, Jamaica, The Coral Reef Preservation Society was made, patch by patch, while Lewis was on the road. Her quilt practice moves as she moves, through travel in Canada, Jamaica, the United States and England, and between art shows and fairs. Fragments are resurrectional, catching something of every location, and so each contains unique sensuous memory, aesthetic possibility, trace, haptic history and ceremony. Each of Lewis’s materials—old clothes, found photographs, the artist’s personal earrings, curtains, blankets—has had some earlier use, some known and unknown, and carries an affective history, something that Lewis has referred to as a “charge.”
