Colette Lewis is an artist and educator whose work explores how communities, materials, and environments co-produce knowledge and shape alternative ways of being together. Through collaborative, site-responsive, and embodied methods, she engages with socio-ecological systems and speculative imaginaries, working with experimental media, performative tools and actions, DIY and open-source resources, and material artefacts to map, sense, and generate possibilities for more relational and post-capitalist futures.

Situated at the intersection of socio-ecological and land-based art, her practice investigates how knowledge emerges through engagement with living ecologies, how materiality connects us to land, and how communities might collectively imagine alternative futures. Across urban and rural landscapes, communities, and civic spaces, she explores how care, attentiveness, and sensitivity can be cultivated without exhausting or extracting from the systems that sustain us. Her practice asks: How do we listen to land, materials, and each other without depleting them? What forms of making, acting, and imagining allow relationality and sensitivity to endure?

Colette is co-founder of Material Gestures, a collaborative research project exploring ecological and material concerns in experimental filmmaking, and PLoT (People’s Land Trust), a social art initiative reimagining urban land use, stewardship, and community-led futures. She is also a founding member of the Ecologies Art Lab and a member of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN), with research increasingly focused on low-impact media practices, land-use transition, and interdisciplinary approaches that generate alternative ways of knowing.

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 at Villa Manin, Udine, Italy); and Tentacular Thinking (MTU James Barry Exhibition Centre, Cork). Recent presentations include the MTU Creative, Performing Arts & Media Research Forum; Sustainable Practices in Print (Print Network Ireland); 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).

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