I am curious about the choice of the materials you use. Your works are made of concrete as A Challenge of Exacting (Encyclopaedia), Diluvium, and Dusk Slug, aluminum cast in Narrowly True but Broadly Misleading, lead for the series Study, but also whiskey, mushrooms, coffee, and agar. What led you to the selection of such disparate materials? What’s the outcome of their encounter? 

I have a curiosity to see how things collide, a sort of active nihilism that helps me take ideas a bit deeper and estrange works away from being didactic, or literal. A few of the materials that I use are organic and are there to relay some information back to the viewer and to co-exist along the same timeline, to ignite the possibility that everything is bound to change, to reveal their impermanence. Even with some of my metal works, the surfaces are malleable, they are bimetallic (lead and aluminum) which are two metals that oxidise at different rates. So even the more permanent works eventually reveal their fragility. 

I am interested in knowing how you yourself ‘read’ your work. Can you step outside James Lewis for a moment and let me know what you see?

My works are there to be interpreted, they hopefully tell a story, or plague a forgotten memory. They are malignant, indecisive, pace makers, fragments, they are writing, they are inability, uncertainty, social injustice, statistical information, tumours. 

But mainly when I look at my work I see old ways of expressing myself, fractions of a larger story about separation and introspection, and the possibility of building a better or worse world than the one we have. 

Your work tries to explore the potential of sculpture and to translate how entropy permeates the world as we perceive it. For example in works such as Narrowly True but Broadly Misleading you expose some facts or statistics (such as the average surface area of human skin, how long it takes for food to be digested, the average amount of unique words spoken per day), are these the facts, the reoccurring patterns as you defined them, that eventually coagulate into the notions of time, space or history? Is this a way to anchor the chaotic and proteiform entropy into tangible yet transitory, visible forms?

Statistics and facts are a simplistic way of communicating complex ideas. They are political tools, educational devices, and conversation starters. The series Narrowly True but Broadly Misleading were a set of propositions for naming separation and dissonance. The works purported to be informative and factual but were actually closer to absurdist, concrete poetry. 

I started with the question, how do we articulate the invisible?  How do I measure the void between two people? And they eventually became disorienting, dizzying, false declarations of certainty.

Can you tell us more about the works exhibited in Temporary Atlas: the series of Dusk Slug and Pattern Problems? What’s the idea behind the whole setting that these two works create?

The exhibition offers a unique opportunity of having works presented in two adjoining rooms. The two Dusk Slugs are rudimentary mirror images of each other, so one room is an echo of the previous room, a misfiring of synapses, left-right brain, a memory, a shadowy doppelgänger. I’m not sure which room is the imposter. 

Perhaps they are both witnesses to spectacle, passive onlookers at the world unfolding and moving in different speeds around them, aware that society cannot be reconciled and pain cannot be shared through empathy.

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Kiki Smith