A Trinidadian Asheville artist spends her days playing with shadow, light and high-pressure paint guns.

by Ursula Gullow . portrait by Matt Rose

Since she was a little girl, Heather Lewis has been drawn to the light. Growing up in Trinidad next to an oil refinery, Lewis, now 49, recalls the long shadows cast upon her bedroom walls by the factory. It’s not the sort of thing most kids grow up with, but for Lewis, the glowing orange light and elongated shadows were staples of her childhood.

They’ve become staples in her artwork as well—installations and projections that Lewis categorizes as “nontraditional drawings.” A shadow, she explains, is much like a stencil that uses light as a medium—flat, the way a traditional drawing is, and totally accurate. But shadows can also be toyed with, and she’s made a career out of doing so. “I can take it outside and blow it up big on a building,” she says of a projected shadow. “It can be destroyed and created in an instant.”

To demonstrate her point, Lewis snaps on the light of an overhead projector in her Asheville basement. With various objects on its bed, the projector creates larger-than-life shadows and forms that are familiar and unexpected all at once: the manufactured symmetry of a plastic fern and the sharp angles of an architectural ruler. “When you take these little junky shapes that you would throw away without a thought, and make them four feet wide, you have to re-evaluate them,” Lewis says. “They’re very powerful graphic images.”

This might explain an audience’s delight with a light projector and interactive display Lewis installed this spring at a party for Hatch, a four-day creative festival in downtown Asheville. “All night, people were arranging their things on it, taking off their shoes, breaking off bits of their phone,” she says. “They wanted to express their own curiosity.”

This summer, Lewis has been showing work at the McColl Center in Charlotte, a relatively new center for edgy, urban work housed in a renovated church. This particular exhibit, a solo show that runs simultaneously with another installation artist, Jeff Schmuki, points to her lifelong interest in illusion and pattern. The piece 31 hand-shaped mirrors, for example, is a careful arrangement of round mirrors that reflects a distorted map of dots. Another, Ladder, appears simply as a ladder casting a shadow upon the wall, but in actuality, the shadow has been painted. “It’s a little joke,” Lewis says.

In her twenties, Lewis lived in Scotland and started what would later become a successful pottery business. Her experiences with the industrial world, including owning a production company, have led her to ponder industry, both personally and in her work. “Industry deskills processes,” she says. “The designer creates something, and the factory makes it without skill.”

Lewis seems fascinated with light projections at the moment, but that doesn’t mean she’s skipped learning the other traditional visual art skills. She’s been drawing since she was a teen. As an art student in Scotland, she produced a series of paintings of nighttime landscapes. “It wasn’t just that they were pretty,” she says of the dots of light in the vast blackness. “They had a significance; humans made this light, and it reflects the values of that society.”

In 2002, Lewis moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, and to Asheville in 2007. She has worked as a drawing teacher at community colleges in both cities and considers her move to the U.S. a turning point in her creative process. When she stepped out of her environment—in this case, Scotland—she had time to pause and reflect on it.

Upon moving to America, Lewis began collecting all sorts of plastic items out of dumpsters, incorporating them as stencils into colorful abstract paintings, produced with a high-pressure paint gun. Today, Lewis produces stencilled drawings by sifting grindings of brake powder—collected from a nearby auto mechanic shop—over found objects and even body parts. Her studio is filled with a library of odd objects, organized into stacks of storage bins. “The real work in the studio is to come in and play,” she says, leafing through sketchbooks filled with experiments and stencil studies. “For me it’s about making stuff by instinct and interest. It’s about asking myself, ‘What happens if I do this, and what does it mean?’”

Heather Lewis is part of the Green Shadow exhibit at The McColl Center in Charlotte through August 20. Her work will appear in a group exhibition, Waking up with Van Gogh, at the Hickory Museum of Art next year. For more, check out www.heatherlewis.net.