Colette Lewis is an artist, researcher, and educator whose practice bridges ecological inquiry, material experimentation, and socially engaged art. Working across experimental media, site-responsive interventions, and sustainable media practices, her work explores the intersections of art, ecology, and community.
She is co-founder of Material Gestures (2022–ongoing), a research project examining ecological and material concerns in experimental filmmaking, and co-founder of PLoT (People’s Land Trust), a social art initiative reimagining urban land use and the commons. She is also a founding member of the Ecologies Art Lab, a learning community exploring ecology, artistic practice, and material transformation, and a member of the Community Economies Research Network (CERN).
Her work has been presented widely, including Rewilding the Image: A Materialist Film Approach (MTU Research Forum, 2025), Sustainable Practices in Print (Print Network Ireland, 2024), Staying with the Trouble Symposium (MTU, 2023), and Art and Politics with Gregory Sholette (SIRIUS Summer School, 2022).
Residencies include Murmuration: Transmit (Scotland, 2024), KinShip Project (Cork, 2022), UNIDEE Residency Programs (Italy, 2021), and Creative Enquiry (Sirius Arts Centre, 2019). Exhibitions and screenings include Orchestra of Disquiet at IndieCork Film Festival (2024) and CineSalon Experimental Film Festival (Cork, 2024), Ways of Becoming: 25 Years with UNIDEE (Cittadellarte, Italy, 2024), Movable Type (Cork Public Museum, 2024), and t3rza terra(Cittadellarte a Villa Manin, Italy, 2024).
Colette is a studio member and board director of the Cork Artists Collective, and a founding member of The Guesthouse. She holds an MA in Visual Art Practices (IADT), a BA in Fine Art Sculpture (LSAD), and a Diploma in Field Ecology (UCC).
At MTU Crawford College of Art & Design, she lectures across undergraduate and postgraduate programmes in Fine Art and Arts and Engagement.
STATEMENT
My work investigates materiality, embodiment, and relational practices through socially and ecologically engaged art. Working across experimental media and site-responsive interventions, I explore how communities, materials, and environments co-produce knowledge and alternative ways of being together.
My practice sits at the intersection of ecological and social contexts, engaging with how materiality links us to land, how embodied knowledge shapes our relations within living ecologies, and how communities might collectively imagine alternative futures. Grounded in feminist materialism, decolonial thought, and community economies, my research moves beyond extractive models of sustainability to explore relational, reciprocal, and regenerative approaches.
Recent projects span cameraless image-making and contact sound as site-responsive dialogues with land; collective land-use initiatives that reimagine urban sustainability; and collaborative research into circular and community-based economies of making. Through interdisciplinary collaboration, experimental media, and theoretical enquiry, I am developing a radical ethics of materiality, one that reframes sustainability as a shared responsibility across human and ecological relations, exploring how artistic practice can create new pathways for material sustainability, collective care, and post-capitalist futures.