Richard Lloyd Lewis

Project Info:
Stained with the copper ore and minerals that lie substrata, the tributaries that weave from North Wales and on to the Irish Sea provide the immediate landscape with its distinct colouration. This coupled with soil toxicity leaves little vegetation, and a texture that speaks of the alien, the unfamiliar. This unfamiliarity is borne out of life’s absence from this landscape, not necessarily that it is a difficult topology to conceive of, or one that we perhaps have not encountered in a similar form previously, rather that the aspect and meaning generated by its rock formations, and deeply gouged earth are the antithesis of what can be considered habitable. However, it is the concept of habitation that lies at the core of this series of new photographs by Richard Lloyd Lewis. Lewis invites us to consider a landscape that at once seems instantly recognisable yet simultaneously demands distance and caution, we must remain at a safe proximity, and with the eye of an explorer, observe. Home is partially constituted by natural geography, the built environment, networks of individuals, their concomitant values, economy, a favourite pillow, shared language, the location of a record collection. The common thread, if there is one, is the absence of threat, a sense of custom and convention, and familiarity. Such representations are absent in Lewis’s images, and the concept of familiarity we are being asked to consider is expanded to the planetary. The landscape Lewis invites us to observe, both in micro and macrocosm, through the mountain and its particulars, is an earth, perhaps the one we currently inhabit, perhaps not. We are asked to consider home in the vastness of geologic temporality rather than through the all too brief window of an individual existence.

Lewis has exhibited nationally alongside artists such as Tracey Emin, Steve Pyke, Hannah Starkey, Gavin Turk, Nadav Kander, Martin Parr, Paul M Smith, Bridget Riley and John Swannell and his photographic prints are now held in several notable private collections

Lewis has a Masters Degree in Photography from The University Of The Arts London - LCC, and a BA (Hons) Degree from Exeter School Of Art & Design - University of Plymouth.

Museum Collections:

‘code name burlington’ is held in the permanent collection at the Imperial War Museum London.

Dead Tree's Event 1 to Event 6 was purchased by the Contemporary Art Society Of Wales in 2016 and is now on permanent display at Monmouthshire County Hall, as the winner of The Purchase Price at The National Eisteddfod Of Wales