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Who Art You · 5:14

Shreds of Memory

Tau Lewis

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In the quiet of her Brooklyn studio, artist Tau Lewis and her team bring an uncommon attentiveness and care to the found fabrics that make up her figurative sculptures. “I have a very deep interior private life,” she tells us, “I’ve been that way since I was a child. I really struggled with communicating and getting my ideas out. Sculpture has been really important to that interior self.” Ornate assemblages of salvaged textiles, the works currently in progress are inspired by ceremonial Yoruba masks that are traditionally used in the process of communicating with a spirit or ancestor. This documentary short, shot on 16-millimeter film, evocatively captures the creation of a suite of large-scale masks that radiate their own personalities and desires.

Patching together the many fabrics collected in her studio, Lewis embraces the histories embedded in the materials she works with.  “A lot of black creation is an upcycling” she says, “regardless of a lack thereof, regardless of an access to. Taking things as they are and letting them shine”. For the artist, the time spent in the studio touching and handling the material is integral to the work, an act of departure into her own interior world. She treats her sculptures as beings in their own right, unrecognized ancestors whose allegorical meaning or talismanic power must be teased out through a hands-on process of recognition. “I’ve heard you,” she offers to the work, “and these are the symbols I’ve made in response to you, and you are being seen.”

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Tau Lewis

About the artists

Tau Lewis was born in 1993 in Toronto, Canada, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A self-taught artist, Lewis has crafted her education through communion with peers, like the queer Caribbean collective RAGGA NYC, and pilgrimages to meet the artists and institutions that inspire her, such as Atlanta-based artist Lonnie Holley and the Gee’s Bend Quilting Association. Once a student of journalism, the artist channels stories through material constructions. Using labor-intensive techniques like hand-sewing, applique, carving, and assemblage, she transforms recycled materials into large-scale figurative works. She likens the practice of upcycling to diasporic methods of art making and survival, situating her work within the deep history, vibrant present, and oracular future of Black cultural production.

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