Colette Lewis is an artist, researcher, and educator whose work investigates materiality, embodiment, and relational practices through socially and ecologically engaged art. Working across experimental media and site-responsive interventions, she explores how communities, materials, and environments co-produce knowledge and alternative ways of being together.
Colette is co-founder of PLoT (People’s Land Trust) (2020–ongoing), a social art project that reimagines urban land use and sustainability through collective strategies and civic co-learning. Projects include the PLoT Radical Summer School(2021) and Mobile Commons (2025–2026), a residency at Tramore Valley Park, Cork.
She is co-founder of Material Gestures (2022–ongoing), a research project on ecological and material concerns in experimental filmmaking and sustainable media art. In 2025, the project established The Photosensitive Garden at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design (CCAD), a research and learning space for plant-based photochemical and art-making processes. She also co-leads Media Materia (2025), a partnership with MTU CCAD, NCAD’s Frugal Media, and Radek Przedpełski, which engages with low-impact, materially conscious moving image practices in response to ecological urgencies.
She has participated in residencies including Murmuration: Transmit (Scotland, 2024), KinShip Project (Cork, 2022), UNIDEE Residency Programs (Italy, 2021), and Creative Enquiry at Sirius Arts Centre (Cork, 2019). Her research has been presented at Sustainable Practices in Print (Print Network Ireland, 2024), Staying with the Trouble Symposium(MTU, 2023), Art and Politics with Gregory Sholette (SIRIUS Summer School, 2022), and Create National Networking Day (2019).
She is a member of The Ecologies Art Lab, an evolving learning community within MTU CCAD that explores the intersections of ecology, artistic practice, and material transformation.
Colette is also a studio and board member of Cork Artists Collective, an independent artist-led studio, and a founding member of The Guesthouse. She holds an MA in Visual Art Practices (IADT), a BA in Fine Art Sculpture (LSAD), and a Diploma in Field Ecology (UCC).
She lectures at MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, where she delivers and supervises postgraduate modules on Research Methods in the Arts and Eco-Art Practice, as well as undergraduate modules in Fine Art Media. Her work bridges artistic practice, ecological inquiry, and socially engaged research, fostering sustainable, collaborative, and critically reflective approaches to contemporary art-making.
STATEMENT
My work investigates materiality, embodiment, and relational practices through socially and ecologically engaged art. Working across experimental media and site-responsive interventions, I explore how communities, materials, and environments co-produce knowledge and alternative ways of being together.
My practice sits at the intersection of ecological and social contexts, engaging with how materiality links us to land, how embodied knowledge shapes our relations within living ecologies, and how communities might collectively imagine alternative futures. Grounded in feminist materialism, decolonial thought, and community economies, my research moves beyond extractive models of sustainability to explore relational, reciprocal, and regenerative approaches.
Recent projects span 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, I am developing a radical ethics of materiality, one that reframes sustainability as a shared responsibility across human and ecological relations, exploring how artistic practice can create new pathways for material sustainability, collective care, and post-capitalist futures.