A sculpted indigenous garden featuring more than 60 works by Dylan Lewis.


‘Shapeshifting’, an essay by Laura Twiggs

‘Where does animalkind end and humankind begin? What of the wild and the primitive within? In exploring these tantalising enigmas, Lewis searches wilderness, myth and ancient belief systems for inspiration, meaning and answers.’

'The Rising': Ian McCallum

One day your soul will call to you with a holy rage.
‘Rise up!’ it will say…

Stand up inside your own skin.
Unmask your unlived life…
feast on your animal heart.
Unfasten your fist…
let loose the medicine in your own hand.
Show me the lines…
I will show you the spoor of the ancestors.
Show me the creases…
I will show you the way to water.
Show me the folds…
I will show you the furrows for your healing.
‘Look!’ it will say…
the line of life has four paths –
one with a mirror, one with a mask,
one with a fist, one with a heart.

One day, your soul will call to you with a holy rage.

What’s happening

Featured Events

About the artist

2026

New Works

Everard Read Cape Town

Everard Read Cape Town | 7-28 March 2026

Throughout his career, Dylan has returned to the wild cats as an important and enduring symbol. This body of work presents some of his most recent animal sculptures.

“In these new works, Lewis returns to the charged territory where the animal form becomes a contemplative vessel for something older than language, a threshold between worlds. His animals are not merely observed – they are invoked. Through surface, texture and form, Lewis reveals the paradox of wild grace: power held in restraint, lithe explosiveness held in silence.

What emerges is less a depiction of species than a meditation on being. The leopard’s contained intensity, the cheetah’s fluid alertness, the buffalo’s obstinate aloofness & the prey’s quick-wittedness become mirrors for our own instinct, vulnerability, and the perpetual negotiation between control and surrender. These works invite us to recognize, in their quiet authority, a shared, untamed pulse. Lewis urges us to encounter not only the essence of these elusive cats but the deeper rhythms that bind all living things: attention, tension, release. The works linger like a held breath, reminding us that the wild is not elsewhere; it waits, attentive and enduring, within and all around us.

 

For over three decades, Lewis has cemented himself as one of the great sculptors of our time, and here again he presents a masterclass in manifesting these beautiful creatures, coiled with stillness and tense with intent. At once effortless and rhapsodic, with ferocity and vigour in every mark.” – Charles Shields

To request a portfolio, please contact: Faith@everard.co.za

Everard Read Cape Town

3 Portswood Road

V&A Waterfront

Cape Town