Alex Lewis

For me, painting is porous, it absorbs its surroundings: stains, residues, memories, footprints, energy and time.

I make speculative, site-specific installations and mixed-media paintings that collage fabric, metalwork and ceramics. Slow craft processes are interwoven with the ephemera of fast fashion and painting itself. The work takes its cue from alternative modes of display such as bazaars, marketplaces and street montages, materially pregnant with objects and cloth. To walk amongst it is to activate a tableaux vivant and to traverse temporal thresholds. My process is a form of excavation, a slow reveal of things buried in the mud but also a return of clay pots to the soil. Clay, a wet pigmented mud is analogous for paint and my paintings are vessels:

"... the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours."

I paint on the floor and walk on my paintings, which I think of as rugs. I unpick various woven fabrics such as decorator’s dust sheets and canvas to form tassels and fringes. The genesis for this came while I was working for a painter - rolling up her works like carpets and interlacing the layers of gesso was like weaving with a brush. Beneath the canvas, I place other fabrics, which absorb remains and accretions from above. My paintings therefore generate other paintings and are provisional, fragmented tools as much as resolved objects. No matter how much reverence we ascribe to painting, it will always be reducible to material; the agency of the fabric leads me.