Catherine Lewis
Participating in We Live With The Land
My work has always contained elements of place and figure, merging autobiographical elements with historical and environmental layers, in both meaning and processes. My education and community work runs in parallel with my solo practice, both having sustainability, climate justice and respect for the earth at their core. I make visual art, through dyeing, drawing, stitch, various print processes. The lens based and audio documentation of process and geographical notes is important too.
As a result of the residency weekend and for the project exhibition, i’m making a new body of work. It explores the creative potential of the botanical colours i gather from around Corris and also here in the southern industrial valleys. I’m specifically referencing scars - of body and landscapes - a theme recurrent in my work, and more pertinent to me following my surgery and recovery from breast cancer.
I cycle and walk the mountains, finding the industrial past i encounter both fascinating and repugnant. The vistas of solid blocks of dark trees, monocultures, barren mountains, where ancient woodlands once were; the loss of our rights of way - disappearing pathways and desire lines of communities; woody valleys full of life and potential; abandoned quarries and fissures of rocks, containing bands of colour; visually and actually repairing the rape of our fair country; to acknowledge these wreckages of communities and nature, and to seek to repair, is a form of climate justice. Using reclaimed fibres and natural colours from plants, rocks and waterways, i’m making interpretations of these damaged and discovered landscapes that i pass through and become a part of. . . I repair in nature.
