James Lewis – Not just suffering, but all forms of consciousness, 2026
James Lewis – The Past is a Foreign Country, 2026

Sunflowers are ruderal plants, which means that they take root in rubble and disturbed sites. In James Lewis’s work, twelve concrete sunflowers stand in yellow fluorescent light. Fixed in place, they cannot follow the cycles of growth and decay that let ruderals colonise unstable terrain, remaining suspended between adaptation and petrification. The installation developed from conversations between the artist and his mother about the house in India where she grew up before leaving for Britain in 1963. In her memory, rooms changed size and doors led nowhere. Lewis allows those inconsistencies to organise the space. A metal duct runs along the floor like a prosthetic lung. It draws outside air into the otherwise closed room and releases a scent developed with his mother to evoke the bay in Mumbai on the morning she left. The smell gives that departure a sensory presence without recovering what memory has lost.

Through sculpture, installation and sound, James Lewis examines how systems of measurement shape perception and experience. His work responds to logics of quantification that reduce complex realities to data, questioning the frameworks that define relationships among humans, animals and objects.