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.

About the artist

INTERRELATE

Dylan Lewis hones his examination into the complexity of human connections even further with this series of sculptures. Here, the inner conflicts of our intimate relationship to the ‘other’ come into focus. They could also be seen as duelling aspects

of one’s own psyche. In contrast to the dramatic quality of Lewis’s Chthonios series, these are intensely personal struggles. Yet they remain equally inharmonious: soft, violent, exquisite, painful, gentle, hard, controlling and freeing.

There is deep meaning to be found in community and relationships, but also judgement, ostracism and shame. For Lewis, the navigation of these tensions has proven an unremitting source of perplexity. The figures in these sculptures are perpetually pulled between agony and ecstasy. Embracing, fighting, grieving, struggling, they channel both the freedom and burden of intimate connection. These are the innumerable micro-conflicts that permeate our relationships to others and ourselves.

Texts by Tim Leibbrandt.

Photography Mike Hall and Dylan Lewis