A sculpted indigenous garden featuring more than 60 works by Dylan Lewis.


‘Shapeshifting’, an essay by Laura Twiggs

‘Where does animalkind end and humankind begin? What of the wild and the primitive within? In exploring these tantalising enigmas, Lewis searches wilderness, myth and ancient belief systems for inspiration, meaning and answers.’

'The Rising': Ian McCallum

One day your soul will call to you with a holy rage.
‘Rise up!’ it will say…

Stand up inside your own skin.
Unmask your unlived life…
feast on your animal heart.
Unfasten your fist…
let loose the medicine in your own hand.
Show me the lines…
I will show you the spoor of the ancestors.
Show me the creases…
I will show you the way to water.
Show me the folds…
I will show you the furrows for your healing.
‘Look!’ it will say…
the line of life has four paths –
one with a mirror, one with a mask,
one with a fist, one with a heart.

One day, your soul will call to you with a holy rage.

About the artist

2009

Shapeshifting

Everard Read Cape Town and Everard Read Johannesburg, South Africa

From the very earliest phases of Lewis’s career, he has exhibited continuously in partnership with the Everard Read Gallery, both in Cape Town and in Johannesburg. This exhibition saw the sculptor showing his monumental male figures for the first time, and thus is a significant milestone for him.

The scale of Everard Read Johannesburg was imminently suited to showing these monumental works indoors.

The horn skull mask worn by this large figure is reminiscent of the archetypal horned god found in several ancient mythologies, including Celtic and Hindu, the most well-known of which must be the Greek, where he is Pan. But this is not to say that Lewis is faithfully recreating only a mythical figure here. Instead, he invests a mortal man with those qualities evoked by the horned god archetype.

The ideas touched on in this exhibition are being further explored in Untamed, a collaborative project between Lewis, architect Enrico Daffoncio and psychologist, psychiatrist, wildlife guide and poet Ian McCallum. Untamed is on at Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden in Cape Town until June 2011.

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