Design and Art Australia Online

Ruark Lewis is a Sydney-based visual artist and writer. He works in a wide range of media such as painting, drawing, installation, artists-books, performance, public art, theatre and audio-video works. Lewis was born in Sydney in 1960 and attended Sydney Boys High School. While there he became interested in pottery. When he was eighteen Lewis suffered permanent spinal injury as a result of a motor-vehicle accident.

Lewis’s formal art studies were in ceramics at the Sydney College of the Arts. During this period he came under the influence of avant-garde composer, David Ahern, and became interested in an experimental realm that explored the relation between language, sound and art. Under Ahern’s encouragement, Lewis moved away from ceramics and began to pursue painting and drawing. Lewis also met and befriended the influential modernist Sydney architect, Bill Lucas. He was attracted as much by Lucas’s minimalist use of structural design as by Lucas’s utopian belief of the architect as a maker of prototypes, from which society could adopt and evolve.

Lewis’s newfound interest in language, art and design found a significant outlet for expression in his first professional position, that of a Curator of poetry readings at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) which he held between 1984 and 1988. During this period the repertoire for readings quickly expanded into a forum that combined traditional poetic text with music, film, dance and radio. In addition to the forum providing an outlet to explore interdisciplinary connections, it brought Lewis into the orbit of young artists, composers, poets and filmmakers such as Martin Harrison, Chris Mann, John Gillies and Ania Walwicz. The curatorial role also fostered in the artist an awareness of the possible intersections between radical modes of creative experimentation, a regionally attuned avant-garde culture and a genuinely broad public audience.

Between 1987 and 1989, Lewis produced his first solo exhibitions in Sydney – entitled 'Transcription Drawings’. The works at these exhibitions are abstractionist in form and present transcriptions of sound and music. The drawings trace not simply the sound itself, but the artist’s embodied translation of that experience. This process, and the performative history it records, is central to understanding Lewis’s art.

At the end of the 1980s and during the early 1990s, Lewis spent much of his time in Melbourne where he again became immersed in a rich creative milieu of writers, artists and composers. These included Rainer Linz, Warren Burt, Alex Selenitsch and Paul Carter. Evidence of the dialogues and exchanges of this world can be found in the publication, New Music Articles(NMA), the ABC Radio program, The Listening Room and the Age Monthly Review. During this period Lewis developed the sound transcription principles of his Sydney exhibitions but on a larger scale, this time using the work of the composer, Robert Douglas. He also examined setting Paul Carter’s radiophonic piece, Mirror States. Although the project remains unrealised, it did enable Lewis to collaborate with Bill Lucas on design, sound and installation techniques which he would carry over into his later work.

Alongside sound and performance, the growing influence of literary text found expression in a series of transcriptions based on the French newspaper, Le Monde. Lewis worked in Paris as Artist in Residence at the Cite Internationale des Arts in 1991 where he began work with the documentarian, Kaye Mortley on a translation of Natalie Sarraute’s play, Pour en Oui Pour en Non. The Douglas and Le Monde Transcription Drawings were exhibited as a solo show as well as part of the Melbourne Festival in 1992. The collaboration with Mortley and Sarraute eventually led to the publication of Lewis’s artist-book Just For Nothing in 1997, a work notable for the use of colour-coding as its design principle.

Lewis’s most significant collaboration during this decade was with the writer, artist and thinker, Paul Carter. Lewis had long been attracted to Carter’s idea of “spatial history”, first proposed in Carter’s highly influential book, The Road to Botany Bay(1987), which sought to give voice to the multidimensional histories Carter saw as integral to the act of place-making in a post-colonial migrant Australia. An opportunity to work with Carter came in an extended multilayered translation on the work of the Central Australian Lutheran Missionary, Carl Strehlow and his son, T. G. H. (Ted) Strehlow, a poet and linguist. EntitledRaft, Lewis and Carter meditated through installation, drawing, text and sound the multilingual, bicultural and migrant legacy of the lives of father and son. Lewis designed a lattice-like structure comprised of wooden beams upon which are stenciled 24, 696 characters in the 6 languages familiar to the Strehlows (Greek, Latin, German, English, Arrernte and Diyari). The raft is also a reference to Carl Strehlow’s harrowing death in Central Australia in 1922, which his son memorialised in the autobiographical narrative, Journey to Horseshoe Bend (1969), a pivotal work for Lewis personally, who has found in Strehlow’s tragic allegory a structural density faithful to the fractured, layered histories of postcolonial Australia. In addition to what Carter has described as the “craft of translation”, Lewis produced a series of Water Drawings which disguise the Strehlows’ translated versions of Western Arrernte Rain Songs eventually compiled in Ted Strehlow’s landmark Songs of Central Australia(1978). Raft has been exhibited in Sydney, Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, the United Kingdom and Germany. Carter and Lewis produced a book, Depth of Translation (1999), which reflects on their collaboration and its significance in the wider context of Australian cross-cultural history.

A second project with Carter, Relay (1999), was one of a number of public artworks commissioned by the Olympic Coordination Authority to commemorate the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. The project provided Lewis with a new opportunity to explore the intersection of poetic text, public design and history. For this work he developed the colour-coding design principle first expressed in Just For Nothing. Relay is a prose poem engraved into the granite steps at Fig Grove and refers to four points in Olympic history: the 1986 games at Athens, Melbourne in 1956, Sydney in 2000 and a future games. Each point is colour-coded as a tier and the poem is accompanied by thirty graffiti clusters derived from the handwriting of renowned Australian Olympians.

During the 1990s Lewis developed his transcription drawing practice into a distinctive mode of concrete poetry with civic applications. This has been achieved through a range of collaborative and solo exhibitions, books, essays and public installations. A particularly important collaboration has been with the composer, Rainer Linz. In Banalities for the Perfect House(2005) Lewis and Linz created a series of performance texts which Lewis gathered from everyday sources such as newspapers, overheard conversation and cookery books. The origins of Banalities can be found in Lewis’s 1998 work, Untitled, created for the SBS TV program, Eat Carpet. The concept was later developed as a theatre piece, Banalities/Banalitäten,performed at the Berlin Poetry Festival in 2003. Here Lewis collaborated with the dancer, Jutta Hell and choreographer, Dieter Baumann to explore the intersection of Lewis’s spoken text and Hall’s dance. In the hands of Lewis and Linz Banalities moved in another direction, extending the polyvocal text designs of Raft and Just For Nothing into the realm of architecture and sound. The texts were inscribed on a variety of surfaces and then installed in wooden frames to create transitional house-like structures one might encounter on a construction-site. The spaces were then further rendered through the performance of Lewis’s readings from the transcribed texts and Linz’s sound work which was processed in real time through multiple computers and loudspeakers systems. Banalities for the Perfect House was installed at various sites including the Performance Space.

In 2008 Lewis and Linz were commissioned to create a public art installation in Canada for the Toronto Nuit Blanche Festival. Lewis devised a sound poem in the form of 550 coloured oil drums. Letters were inscribed onto the drums which were then stacked to form an industrial wall across a street. A sound composition was designed to accompany the poetic text which would unfold during the 12-hour period ('wake’) between dusk and dawn. Named Euphemisms for the Intimate Enemy, Lewis and Linz drew on the theoretical writings of the Indian postcolonial writer, Ashis Nandy.

Since 2001 Lewis has formed a collaborative relationship with the Sydney Indigenous artist, Jonathan Jones. The two became friends when initially commissioned to create a group installation, Reckonings, which explored Aboriginal-European ideas about reconciliation. Lewis and Jones have since worked on a number of large-scale projects that have fused the materials – text, environmental surfaces and lights – which now characterise their respectively distinctive creative signatures. In Homeland Illuminations (2007), Lewis fashioned a series of rectangular boards upon which were stenciled a transcribed text of Jones’s grandfather’s trade as a wool classer. These boards were then illuminated with Jones’ fluorescent lights. In the same year Lewis and Jones worked on a site-specific show alongside the poet, Amanda Stewart and composer, Rik Rue at Singapore’s Post-Museum, 'Index of Kindness’, in which they hung flags with superimposed fragmentary text drawn from the work of Sarraute and Nandy respectively and positioned throughout the gallery painted objects, often based on discovered pieces of garbage in streets and beaches. In these collaborations Lewis tabulated the interstices of everyday exchange, while revealing the ingrained relation between silence and conversation, orality and print, movement and stillness.

The inscrutable richness of such mundane yet richly elusive zones has provided Lewis with a plethora of forums to explore in his own writings. Following the transcriptions of Natalie Sarraute in 1997, he turned to the poetry of the Austrian post-war poet, Ingeborg Bachmann, illustrating a newly translated volume of her poems, Days in White (2003). The volume was translated by Angelika Fremd who had also worked as translator on Raft and Banalitaten. In his sound-poetry book False Narratives (2006), in which he again collaborated with Rainer Linz, Lewis engaged with the conventions of everyday language and speech to create a set of printed cards and lithographs that assemble stories into a concrete poem that can be rearranged by audiences. False Narratives was exhibited in Milan, Adelaide and Auckland. As with the artist’s earlier transcriptions, False Narratives negotiates the landscape of text, history, sound and performance and in so doing produces a new understanding of the original source. Like so much of that corpus of work, the final result is a densely patterned narrative that escapes the representational while balancing the linear and non-linear.

Lewis has more recently explored two interrelated areas. The first concerns his interest in creating environmentally integrated works. This is evident in the 2007 installation, Banalities for the Perfect House, which was created for the artist-run-initiative named SLOT in Redfern. For this project Lewis created a 7-metre high facade on the front of a building, upon which was stenciled the reassembled everyday stories of the community. The SLOT project points to the second of his current concerns: the relationship between transcription and local history. In 2009 Lewis created what he described as an “ephemeral public art installation” called Housing the Seafaring Nation. Three installation sites using billboards and stenciled text were created at Millers Point and attached to the facades of public buildings, including the National Trust Building at Observatory Hill. The texts are storyboards that originate from interviews and conversations with local people. Taken together, these sites re-inscribe Millers Point as the oldest continuing urban community in European-Australian history, one in danger of losing its public housing history to the interests of private development. In this and other contemporary projects Lewis’s longstanding engagement with the intersections between regional creative experimentation and a genuinely broad public interface can be said to have assumed a heightened level of urgency.

In addition to his own publications, Lewis has attracted the attention of various commentators. Most recently, an essay on the making of Relay has appeared in Paul Carter’s book, Dark Writing (2009). Lewis’s work is held in numerous national and international collections including the Art Gallery of New South Wales, the Art Gallery of South Australia, the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Bibliotheque Nationale de Paris, the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin, The British Library, the State Library of New South Wales, the National Library of Australia and Wollongong City Gallery. Lewis has lectured at the Sydney College of the Arts and is currently Convenor of Visual Arts and Performance at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in Melbourne.

Writers:

Paull, James

Date written:

2010

Last updated:

2011

Status:

peer-reviewed