The New York–based artist Tau Lewis employs various sculptural techniques to create colorful, totemic forms that suggest mythical territories beyond our own. In the conception of these forms, Lewis develops respective identities and narratives in an intermediary world that implicates our ancestral pasts, spiritual and cultural similitudes, and multiplanar existences.
Inspired by the contemporary work of Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, classical Greek and Roman mythology and drama, and science-fiction stories, Lewis expands the narrative and world-building possibilities of her own characters. Figures appear in other guises throughout the artist's various bodies of work and populate her domain with not only their presence and associated fables but also with what she terms their "material DNA," the genetic thread that binds them together. By using donated, damaged, or unwanted fabric as well as saving and reconstituting scraps from previous projects, Lewis likewise preserves the essence of the previous lives of these materials, painstakingly stitching their histories into her works of art and allowing each composition to evolve and change in a freeform way as she handles the materials during the work's
construction.
The present work relates to a monumentally scaled mask titled Saint Mozelle that debuted in Lewis's 2022–23 solo exhibition Vox Populi, Vox Dei at 52 Walker, New York. Mozelle is a Hebrew name that means "saved out of the water"—a feminine counterpart to the name Moses. This floral strand as well as those extending from the mask echo the hanging blossoms of Lewis's body of work known as T.A.U.B.I.S. (an acronym for "Triumphant Alliance of the Ubiquitous Blossoms of Incarnate Souls," first exhibited in 2020). The artist sees T.A.U.B.I.S. encompassing both the beings and the realm where they reside, which "explore desires for
abundance, safety, deep roots, and justice."1
For Saint Mozelle, Lewis was inspired by lotophagi, the "lotus-eaters" of Greek myth that originated in the Odyssey. In the epic, Odysseus encounters the friendly tribespeople who consume lotus plants and live in a state of blissful ignorance on an island off the northern coast of what is now Africa. Lewis sees Saint Mozelle as a "tutelary deity and a sanctuary," representing a similar state of serenity and calm.2 The present hand-dyed and hand-sewn vine—composed of recycled leather, silk, and fabric scraps that are variously dyed and painted—is one of the figure's "prolongations…which grow out of the mouth and grooves and folds of Saint Mozelle's skin," providing the figure with an "omnipresent physical form [that is] never in one place andalways in communication with the earth and the aevum.