Anna Lewis

Bio

Anna Lewis is a Welsh based artist and designer maker exploring ideas through the mixture of jewellery, fashion, photography and film.  Originally trained as a jewellery designer, she has exhibited in contemporary craft galleries and events all over the world including a solo show in Japan and Shmuck in Munich Jewellery Week. Anna’s work has been featured in many international design publications and books including Elle Décor, living etc, Crafts, Selvedge and The Times magazine. Anna has also diversified into large-scale installation and collaborated more recently with photographers and filmmakers on several projects including music videos and fashion film. She is currently a lecturer in Design Crafts and Surface Pattern Design at Swansea College of Art, Wales.

Statement

Notions of the body, beauty and making in mixed media remain central to the work. The relationship between body, object and material is constantly questioned. An innovative use of mixed media often combines with delicately printed imagery with materials such as feathers, leather, wood, silk, stones, silver and vintage objects. Most of the work is created by hand but also utilizes new technologies such as laser cutting, digital print and 3d printing.
Inspiration stems from on-going research into the memorial, human emotion, death and beauty, the uncanny and an overall feeling of storytelling and otherworldliness.


Memorial, superstitions, heirlooms, and amulets have consistently been interconnecting themes which have inspired and informed my work be it jewellery or large-scale installation. I realised I was striving to discover the symbolic significance of objects in peoples lives whether they be personal, religious, cultural or universal. Stemming from a fascination with recording my own personal history and emotional connections I became interested in the relationship people have with certain objects and how they influence behaviour and belief through their material meanings. I interpret these influences both symbolically and visually in my work.  This has recently merged into much darker themes exploring death itself and its connection to the beauty and to the idea of the object fetish.  The Uncanny has become central to the development of the work and the nature of veiling.  I am always drawn to the idea of magic in objects and of otherworldliness in storytelling, this often occurs in my work as does my own emotional state, my own story. Birds are a recurring theme in the work as are feathers and natural materials, these are used in multiples to create layered new forms that are often curious, beautiful and disturbing. It is the duality of this feeling that both draws and repels.
I combine materials like feathers, leather, wood, silver and stones that are often printed with delicate traces of imagery. Personal memory and emotion with reference to a lost time are constant threads running through the work. Some of the photographs and films deliberately set out to undermine people’s sense of normality whilst creating a somewhat disturbing dream like state.
/ Anna Lewis


touch don't touch, 2020
"Touch don’t touch" is a collection created for Nuda Vita 2020. Building on the idea of the corset being a tool of both constriction and manipulation I wanted to bring the work back to the idea of the naked body in close proximity to the object, be it the corset or the feather sculptures I create. Questions are frequently being asked about what it means to be human and how our humanity is changing, our connect or disconnect with nature and also with each other.
In our too fast-paced existence, fuelled by technology, politics, the climate and the pressures of modern society, have we become distracted or disrupted from being human? There is a sense of division over issues in the world that is also echoed in a sense of lack of control and in our ability to form meaningful relationships. There are boundaries in place in society to avoid touch, touch makes us human and we are becoming less tactile through fear of being misunderstood. We long to touch and be touched yet have built up defences to ensure those boundaries are kept firmly in place, to keep others at bay.  Desire to connect beyond a sense of disconnect, to rediscover the human, the naked body, to seek out a connection that is visceral, corporeal and sensual. A need to reunite, to reverse the disruption of the human and override the detachment that is damaging us. The work explores notions of a defensive embrace, these polar opposites consider what is too fragile to touch, too beautiful, too unobtainable. To touch is to destroy, the desire for ‘the human touch’ may ultimately be the ‘touch of death’.
/ Anna Lewis
 

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