Tau Lewis: “Sometimes dark places are perfect”

It’s the opening night of Tau Lewis’ solo show at Sadie Coles HQ on Bury Street. I arrive to find Sadie Coles herself pouring out cups of champagne. The crowd is buzzing and the gallery feels bright and warm. Downstairs, I take another look at the sculpture bust, Venus in Pisces, that stood like a kind of guardian, watching over the artist and me earlier that day when I interviewed her. Tonight, Lewis is wearing a top stitched with metal hook-and-eye closures, the same ones I spotted sewn into another of her sculptures. “Letting go of something I’m sentimental about is something I do often,” she tells me. “I put my jewellery in or on the artwork sometimes. It feels almost sacrificial, or like I’m giving an offering.”

The Toronto-born, New York-based artist is not a traditionalist. She didn’t go to art school, though she borrowed a friend’s OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) student card to access studios and lectures. “I’m glad I didn’t go to art school at the time, because I was still figuring out my visual and material language,” she reflects. “I probably would have doubted myself.” That same instinct to guard her practice remains. Lewis has always prioritised a quiet life – more hermetic than socialite. “I don’t go out a lot and I don’t like a lot of outside influence, so I don’t go out and look at a lot of art. I think that surprises people,” she says. “I’m not a social butterfly. Some artists are, and it works really well for them. But I really need to stay inside with my things.”

‘The ways of the underworld are perfect’ is Lewis’ first solo show with Sadie Coles, having previously exhibited with the gallery in the group show, ‘What Do You See, You People, Gazing at Me’, at the end of 2021. Since then, Lewis has gone on to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, 52 Walker in New York, the ICA in both Boston and Miami, and David Zwirner in Los Angeles. Lewis’ previous soft sculptures have been gargantuan, reaching up to 13 feet in height. Between one and two metres tall, these new works mark an interesting scaling-down for the artist. Working smaller has allowed Lewis to experiment more with texture, repurposing beads and leather, and using fragments from previous projects to create her assemblages.

Born to Jamaican and French Canadian parents, Lewis’ love affair with sourcing secondhand materials was nurtured by her mother. “I used to go thrifting as a kid with my mom. We bought pretty much everything secondhand from Goodwill. I remember it feeling like a treasure hunt.” Sourcing these materials now is its own pilgrimage; the artist has toured secondhand stores from Toronto to Long Island, picking through furriers’ basements and scavenging Dead Horse Bay in Brooklyn. “You can learn a lot about a place by its discarded things,” she says. “I look for distinctive markings, signs of life and smells. I love the smell of leather, especially. It hangs on to people’s essence. You can always tell if a leather jacket was worn by a smoker or somebody who wore lots of perfume, it hangs on to the scent of their skin. It’s very romantic. I love wondering about the lives of these materials and the lives of the people too.”

Each work in the show embodies a chapter in the odyssey of Venus in retrograde. In the Sumerian myth, Venus is represented by the goddess Inanna – an allegory for the human experience of descending into the underworld, undergoing rebirth and transformation. “As a person who’s interested in the imaginary and looking to other worlds and other ways of being, reading and studying myth is important to me.” Lewis makes her work like a conjuring, from the initial spark of an idea through to intuitively scavenging found materials and hand-dyeing fabrics. “It feels like witchcraft. The whole process feels like a sort of ritual. And it kind of is.” The sculptures feel like living beings mid-conversation, humming a story to one another. Surrounded by the giant faces – placed around the room like a kind of fairy ring – they appear to breathe, stretch and whisper. They are characters with backstories etched into their fabric: leather that holds the scent of a previous owner, cloth rust-dyed by relics dredged from the sea, embroidered roses blooming from the corners of faces.

The masks – hovering somewhere between portrait and portal – are suspended like sentinels, or spirit messengers. “In Inanna’s descent into the underworld, she hears the voice of the underworld over and over again. She’s frustrated, she’s uncomfortable, and each time she protests what’s happening to her, she’s told by this big, bellowing voice, ‘Quiet Inanna, the ways of the underworld are perfect. They may not be questioned.’” This phrase has become a comfort for Lewis and acts as a kind of compass for her viewers. Each piece embodies a part of the deity’s story, from the start of the descent to the catharsis of surrender and calm found in the darkness.

Lewis builds each sculpture from the inside out, beginning with what she calls an “armature,” or a kind of metal egg shell, then layering batting, fabric and skin. And the details are her favourite part. “I made these sculptures as I was sorting through a lot of my materials, so a lot of my favourite things made their way into this exhibition. It feels like a sort of boiled down, very jammy, flavourful reduction of all of the best things from the past.”

Understanding all the time and detail that goes into her work, I wonder if Lewis ever truly feels like a piece is finished. “It’s interesting when people ask me that. I think what would be really useful for artists is if we had somebody to sit in the corner of our studio and say, ‘That’s enough, cut it out.’ I could just keep toiling away at things forever. I think I just have anxiety about things leaving. I struggle with goodbyes, so I never want to feel like a piece is finished.” Her sculptures reflect that inwardness. They reflect the hands that made them, the bodies that wore them, the objects that once lay forgotten at the bottom of a tide. Her studio is filled with such items: from shells and stones to old pieces of machinery and chains. “Putting these pieces together feels incredible – it’s like fitting puzzle pieces together. Really what these objects are is just a configuration of different puzzle pieces. Once I gather enough of them that fit together, then I have an artwork.” Her favourite work in the show (although she admits to feeling like she shouldn’t have one) is Earth remembers!, which stands at the centre of the gallery, looking out onto the street. “I feel very connected to it. Maybe because it’s the baby – I finished her last. I like that there’s something solemn but hopeful about her.”

Hope in Lewis’ hands is never naive – it’s sobering. Like Inanna, it’s the kind of hope born from being stripped down and transformed, from being asked to surrender in the dark. “Sometimes dark places are perfect.”