LUCILLE LEWIN, ROMILLY SAUMAREZ SMITH

Taking inspiration from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the exhibition explores imagined and unseen worlds. Calvino’s vision of cities as “a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms” finds resonance in both artists’ practices. Lewin and Saumarez Smith conjure miniature worlds from materials dug from the ground or found on its surface: from clay, metal, and sea wrack, to fossils, antique objects, and precious stones.

While landscapes such as Anglesey, Newfoundland, and the South African coastline inform their practices, it is the invisible, the subterranean, and the cosmic that animate their imaginations. Their sculptures suggest fantastical topographies: underwater realms, fossil records, and celestial maps.

Working by accretion, both artists build up vocabularies of form and material. Lewin’s spiralled tubes of clay, electroformed copper, and glass evoke organic life forms but remain abstract, suggesting a world forming from chaos. Saumarez Smith, who works with a team that she calls her ‘translators’, transforms found objects into enigmatic, poetic assemblages; antique knife handles become trees, coral limbs emerge from thimbles, ammonites grow surreal crystalline forms.

Though neither artist seeks to literally replicate the natural world, everything they create is a metaphor. The works gleam and glitter, luring the viewer into worlds that feel ancient, futurebound, and mythic all at once.

For both Lewin and Saumarez Smith, art-making is an act of compulsion—a drive to communicate through form. The resulting sculptures speak in an original and deeply intuitive language, offering maps of thought, memory, and imagination.