Colette Lewis is an artist and educator whose practice bridges ecological and social inquiry, material experimentation, and socially engaged art. Working across experimental media, site-responsive interventions, and sustainable practices, her work explores how communities, materials, and environments co-produce knowledge and alternative ways of being together.
She is co-founder of Material Gestures, investigating ecological and material concerns in experimental filmmaking, and PLoT (People’s Land Trust), a social art initiative reimagining urban land use and the commons. She is also a founding member of the Ecologies Art Lab and a member of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN)
Recent exhibitions and screenings include Murmuration: Transmit Audio Release, Reaction and Disruption, IndieCork Film Festival, Ways of Becoming: 25 Years with UNIDEE (Cittadellarte–Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy), CineSalon Experimental Film Festival, Movable Type (Cork Printmakers Letterpress Exhibition, Cork Public Museum), t3rza terra(Pistoletto / Cittadellarte a Villa Manin, Udine, Italy), and Tentacular Thinking (MTU James Barry Exhibition Centre, Cork).
Recent presentations include the MTU Creative, Performing Arts & Media Research Forum, Staying with the Trouble Symposium (Rory Gallagher Theatre, MTU Bishopstown Campus, Cork), and Art and Politics with Gregory Sholette (SIRIUS Summer School).
Colette lectures across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design. She holds an MA in Visual Art Practices (IADT), a BA in Fine Art Sculpture (LSAD), and a Diploma in Field Ecology (UCC).
STATEMENT
My practice is situated at the intersection of eco-social and land-based art, exploring how embodied and situated knowledge shapes our relationships within living ecologies, how materiality connects us to land, and how communities might collectively imagine alternative futures. Grounded in feminist materialism, decolonial thought, and community economies, and working across experimental media and site-responsive interventions, I investigate how communities, materials, and environments co-produce knowledge and alternative ways of being together. Artistic practice becomes a method for sensing, mapping, and engaging these relations, opening space for post-capitalist imaginaries rooted in lived, situated experience.
My methodology is embodied, relational, and situated, attentive to land, materiality, and infrastructure. It is founded on the understanding that knowledge is inseparable from bodies, communities, and ecosystems, extending into questions of reciprocity, sustainment, and care. By thinking with land rather than merely about it, my work emphasises co-emergent, relational approaches. I ask: How do we care for what sustains us? How do we listen to land, materials, and each other without exhausting or extracting them? What structures allow sensitivity to be held rather than overwhelmed?
Recent projects include cameraless image-making and contact sound as site-responsive dialogues with land, collective land-use initiatives that reimagine urban sustainability, and collaborative research into circular and community-based economies of making. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, experimental media, and theoretical enquiry, my work seeks to generate counter-narratives to dominant transition discourses, demonstrating how community-rooted economies can inform more just and regenerative futures.