METALSMITH MAGAZINE Vol. 41 No. 1

EXCERPT:

“The Figure of the Falling is a quiet meditation on corporality, memory, trauma, and the materiality of silver. This deeply personal body of work by Betsy Lewis opened at Brooklyn Metalworks as New York City shuttered in the midst of a pandemic that has intrinsically altered our collective being. Lewis’s exhibition of silver-smithed objects, both sculptural and wearable, examines personal loss and mines the material of silver as a conduit for memory. The social reckoning that continues to rage outside the walls of the exhibition has brought another level of poignancy to the work, underscoring the affinity between personal trauma and societal crisis. I left feeling as though The Figure of the Falling was both prescient of the reckoning to come and a fateful reception for the public as they are met with a post-reality.

Silver is the material of heirlooms - it endures generations, bears witness to history and embodies memories. It is also heavy. For Lewis, that weightiness is significant. It allows her to conceptualize the burden of traumatic memory, of grief, of coping with unbearable loss. It also allows her to materialize lasting commemorations. In her antecedent works, like Sensorium, Lewis avoided rendering the body directly. Rather, she occupied a space adjacent to it, forging imagined tools and medical instruments that conceivably worked in service to the body. The Figure of the Falling marks a significant departure, now articulating and adorning the corporeal subject head-on, with its core as her focus.

The primary fixtures in the exhibition are three low, casket-shaped plinths aligned down the center of the gallery. Arranged on a diagonal axis, they visually interlock, forming a spinal column within the space. Each pedestal-vertebrae holds a single object – atop the first, is A Hymn, A Hum, A Wish, a monumental sculpture of a broken wishbone. Nearly three feet in length, the work was cast and formed from four ingots of silver, the total amount of silver Lewis owned and was working with at the time her close friend passed away. The wishbone is the symbolic center. Buzzing from the energy of a fission, the remnant of a break, the oversized sculpture signifies a commemorative offering and a wishful sendoff into the next life. 

Figure 1 Blanket, a dense, kinetic fabric swatch composed of silver wire knots, is the exhibition’s pièce de résistance. In repose over a low rectangular plinth at the center of the gallery, it simultaneously evokes comfort and grief -- a pall over a coffin. The aggregated mass of interlocking silver barbs resembles a heavy woolen blanket from afar but upon closer inspection, its sharp tines rouse danger. When worn, the density of the material mimics the comforting weight of embrace, but its bristles needle into the skin like a silver cilice. The dichotomous nature of the work -- repellent yet comforting, dangerous yet protective -- materially articulates coping with traumatic memory. Further, the iterative, labor-intensive process of building the work, knot by entangled knot, mimics the repetitive, almost obsessive manner in which the brain attempts to cope with loss. Knots are charged with corporeal metaphor and for Lewis, “knots are used as a technical way of building while also balancing the literal and abstract interpretations of the heart, the chest, and the belly.”  

Inside the third, open-top pedestal, lies A Hollow Hold, a meandering tube of soldered silver beads that takes the knotted shape of an aorta. Like Figure 1 Blanket, A Hollow Hold is also built from the accretion of singular, handwrought elements. Rather than the knots she used as the building units for the blanket, the units for this piece are handmade beads synclastically formed from silver tubing. Each rounded patty is soldered on top of the next and the angle of the hammered and soldered edge directs the winding, organic shape of the tube. What I find particularly dynamic about Lewis’s process is how she develops a set of organizing principles for a particular work and allows the minute differences between the handwrought elements to shape the greater piece. She finds form in the unity between controlled logic and chance and the metalsmithing process itself feeds her conceptual inquiry.”