Colette Lewis is an artist, researcher, and educator working at the intersection of social and ecological contexts. Her research examines environmental and material issues, focusing on our complex relationships with resources, waste, and the environment.

Working across moving image, photography, printmaking, sound, installations, publications, performative actions, and public engagement, she investigates these interconnected themes through interdisciplinary collaboration. She is currently involved in several projects exploring ecological thinking and collective practice.

‍Material Gestures is a research collaboration formed in 2022 with artist Collette Nolan. It investigates plant and earth-based biochemical processes through an aesthetics of contact across the material bodies of moving image film, print, contact sound, and site-responsive practices. She is currently developing these processes through fieldwork within the floodplain ecosystem of the Curragheen River in Cork City.

In 2019, she co-founded PLoT (People’s Land Trust) with Marilyn Lennon and Elinor Rivers to explore future land sustainability through radical models of urban commons and Community Land Trusts. Their past initiatives include hosting an urban outdoor radical school that utilised handcarts as a mobile infrastructure for civic co-learning and future visioning (Arts Participation Project AwardArts Council of Ireland, 2021) Currently, PLoT's latest project, Mobile Commons, is in residence at Tramore Valley Park, Cork (2024–2026), engaging with the unique context of a public park built on a former landfill site.

More recently, in 2024, she launched a new initiative with sustainable design practitioner Lisa Zimmerman (MTU) called FIBR, a pilot paper laboratory that explores alternative models of collective material engagement and community economies. This research grew out of the (Waste) Fibre Flows Laboratory, created during her Artist Residency with the KinShip Project in 2022. The laboratory served as an experimental space to explore interdisciplinary approaches to our complex relationship with waste materials. Collaborating with textile artists Helen O’Shea and Caroline Smith, alongside urban theorist Roy Wroth, they examined the resource potential of textile waste.

She has participated in residencies at Murmuration ‘Transmit’ (Scotland, 2024), KinShip Project (Cork, 2022), UNIDEE Residency Programs (Italy, 2021) and 'Creative Enquiry' Sirius Arts Centre (Cork, 2019). She has presented research at various events, including Sustainable Practices in Print (Print Network Ireland, 2024), Staying with the Trouble Symposium at MTU (2023), Art and Politics with Gregory Sholette (SIRIUS Summer School, 2022), and Create National Networking Day (2019).

Colette is a member and Director at the Cork Artists Collective independent artist-led studio and a founding member of The Guesthouse Project. She hold an MA in Visual Art Practices (IADT), a BA in Fine Art Sculpture (LSAD), and a Diploma in Field Ecology (UCC). As an Assistant Lecturer at Crawford College of Art & Design, she teaches across Fine Art, Arts and Engagement, and Eco Arts Practice programmes.

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STATEMENT

My work lies at the intersection of social and ecological contexts, engaging with environmental and material matters through moving image, photography, printmaking, sound, installations, publications, performative actions and public engagement. Collective practices and interdisciplinary collaboration informs an expanded approach to these interconnected themes.

Grounded in feminist materialism, decolonial thought and post-capitalist possibilities my practice questions dominant sustainability narratives, moving beyond extractive models to explore relational, reciprocal, and regenerative approaches. My work engages with land-based practice, recovered waste materials, and experimental systems of redistribution to critically examine resources, waste, and environmental responsibility.

Through current projects I am researching site-responsive cameraless image-making and contact sound as a material dialogue with envirnomental locations, collective land-use initiatives that rethink urban sustainability, and a pilot paper laboratory that explores alternative economies of making. These initiatives examine how artistic practice can intersect with decentralised resource-sharing and material commons.

My ongoing research focuses on developing a radical material ethics, one that reframes sustainability as a collective responsibility. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, theoretical inquiry, and applied experimentation, I explore how artistic practice can create new pathways for material sustainability, collective care, and post-capitalist futures.