2019

Institute Of Dwelling

The Institute of Dwelling explored dwelling as an embodied and imaginative practice. The project examined how bodies, gestures, habits, and everyday rituals shape how we inhabit the world, and how labour, care, and routine might be understood as sites of knowledge and collective meaning. Central to the work was a concern with reclaiming embodied intelligence, valuing bodily sensitivity, intuition, and tacit knowledge as forms of knowing that sit alongside, and often resist, rational or instrumental systems.

Adopting a playful pseudo-identity, the project reimagined the construction worker as the Dwelling Agent, subverting familiar aesthetics of labour through feminised workwear, red boiler suits, and ‘magical’ headgear. Construction tools were repurposed as performative objects, blending functionality with absurdity, ritual, and humour. Through play and performative gesture, the work softened authority and disrupted masculinised, extractive narratives of productivity, opening space for alternative readings of labour as attentive, relational, and caring.

Public interventions took the form of performative actions inspired by vernacular and folk practices, operating in the space between ritual and routine, the absurd and the sublime. Everyday actions were transformed into moments of heightened attention, inviting reflection on how meaning is produced through repetition, presence, and embodied engagement. Public space functioned as a site of encounter, creating shared moments that invited audiences into speculative and imaginative relationships with place, labour, and collective life.

The Institute of Dwelling was a collaborative project by Marilyn Lennon, Colette Lewis, and Elinor Rivers (2018-2019).

Water Broadcasting Secret Stations

2019

Performative action and exhibition,
Skibbereen Arts Festival

Orange road sign

Water Broadcasting Secret Station was a performative action and public intervention devised as a water divining and mapping event at The Fairfield, Skibbereen, Co. Cork, as part of the Skibbereen Arts Festival 2019. Developed in collaboration with local water diviners in West Cork, participants used metal divining rods, hazel rods, and pendulums to locate underground water, employing their bodies as antennas to tune into the earth’s hidden currents.

Findings were mapped through mark-making with chalk and charcoal directly onto the ground and translated into a large-scale drawing on paper. By reimagining water divining as an artistic and participatory practice, the project invited participants to engage with invisible ecological systems, blending practical, vernacular knowledge with poetic and speculative approaches. As Seamus Heaney described, the work brought “uncontrollable electric signals, water suddenly broadcasting through a green aerial its secret station.”

The work explores embodied listening, collective perception, and the ways human and nonhuman systems intersect, revealing how hidden forces shape landscapes and encouraging participants to attune to place through ritual, play, and collaborative observation.

Colette Lewis

© Colette Lewis 2022