Art Exhibition - Our Landlord, The Ocean: LEWIS

Our Landlord, The Ocean is a site-specific installation by LEWIS.

Created for Obsidian Bide: Art Gallery and Studio and the Bribie Island Nature Festival, Our Landlord, The Ocean transforms the gallery into a grotto: a constructed sanctuary assembled from found, repurposed, natural and industrial materials gathered during residency on Yarun / Bribie Island.

The grotto, geological and handmade, a space carved by water and a ramshackle shrine built from whatever the landscape offers. It opens an unexpected conversation with Bribie's artistic history and Ian Fairweather, who lived and worked in improvised shelters made from bark, timber and salvaged materials in the island's dunes. This is a new connection, not a tribute or imitation.

Beneath the shelter sits a harder proposition. The work responds to housing precarity and rewrites the Australian Dream: security is not found in title deeds, but in knowing and tending a place. On an island where shorelines are shifting and the sea is already redrawing the edge of habitation, the ocean becomes more than scenery. It is the landlord arriving to collect.

Part shelter, part shrine, the installation is deliberately wild and impermanent. Nothing pretends to last forever, everything is borrowed. Yet the grotto remains a place for wonderment, repair and the possibility that belonging might mean something other than ownership.