Tau Lewis (b.1993 Toronto, Canada) lives and works in New York. Tau Lewis uses intricate craft processes to transform found textiles into monumental artworks, building a unique iconography informed by African diasporic communities in an act of agency, resistance and healing. Lewis employs the conceptual possibilities of textiles and their real and imagined lineages – considering the past lives of the materials and how their history manifests in their physicality – as a regenerative process through which to examine identity, the body, interdependence and shared histories. Lewis transforms these recycled materials into large-scale figurative works and likens the practice of upcycling to African diasporic methods of art making and survival, situating her work within the deep history, vibrant present, and oracular future of Black cultural production.
