As a child, teenager, and young adult, I was told that art was a way to express yourself. I listened and nodded along, but it never felt comprehensive. For me, art was something in and of itself. It wasn’t about expression or connection in the social sense but functioned as an adjacent world with a holding capacity greater than the relationships around me.

Art behaved like a flower; with the muscles needed to expand and contract, to release and hold. Its communicative ability was its pollen, a feature, but not the skin, the body, the full breadth of its being.

 

My mum, Kaidy Lewis, is a painter and has been for as long as I can remember. I grew up watching her work, feeling the amount of emotion and care that went into each brushstroke. Through watching her, I began to understand art not only as release, but as a place to put things too.

 

The body holds memory, and art has the power to give those sensations form - to transmute them, change them. Not to simplify what is felt, but to arrange it: to bring shape, texture, and order to things that would otherwise remain diffuse. I was privy to art not only as a skill, but as a way of being, of relating, of understanding.

 

The strongest themes in Soft Vase were womanhood, agency and layered perspective. This was something my mother and I never needed to discuss beforehand. Muse Gallery and its owner - Abhi Sivadas - met the work with warmth and curiosity. What worked so well in this exhibition, was that less was deduced, and in openness, more was learned.

 

Exhibiting alongside my mother made this especially visible to me. Standing beside someone who is so close to you reveals how much has already been shaped in relation. Style, palette, material sensitivity - none of these develop in isolation.

 

What is being held in the work is not just individual expression, but a life lived - at least in part - together. The dough of relationship itself, worked into form.

 

Art is something we share because relationships alone cannot survive without  boundaries - and art does not need them.

                 

                   Kaidy and Madeline photographed at the opening reception of Soft Vase.

 

When I am making art, I am pulled through a veil into a room of high contrast, but no dial switch. It arrestingly beautiful, but absolutely difficult. The space is without beginning or end; there is no fixed position, yet every ability to move, and no place to go.

 

When I am making art, I am not first and foremost making with material, but with feeling. This is the space where concise form can be given to something that remains un-named. This is the space where the beauty of life is honored unreasonably. Its capacity is unmatched, because it does not know relational boundary. There is this, and then there is relationship.

 

I am speaking of a container that can hold everything and make love of it. Art is not the product; art is the space from which it pours. What you have, as by-product, is work that holds many secrets, yet remains radically honest.

My college art professor once asked me, “what are you trying to talk about?”

I responded with, “All of it.”