What happens when the environment we depend on begins to push back?
Created for Obsidian Bide: Art Gallery & Studio, OUR LANDLORD, THE OCEAN transforms the gallery into a grotto: a constructed sanctuary assembled from found, repurposed, natural and industrial materials gathered during LEWIS’s residency on Yarun / Bribie Island.
The grotto is both 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.
Visit the exhibition
Full exhibition: Wednesday 7 October – Wednesday 4 November 2026
Nature Festival: Friday 9 – Sunday 11 October • 10am–5pm
After the festival: Wednesday–Sunday • 10am–2pm
Free entry • No booking required
LEWIS is a Gold Coast–based interdisciplinary artist working across installation, performance, textiles and digital assemblage. Their practice blends vernacular mysticism, humour and speculative research to create portals, thresholds and participatory rituals shaped by everyday Queensland life.
Artist website
Instagram @mayorofqueensland
Repair Ritual workshops with LEWIS
What kinds of memories or feelings can an object carry? Bring a broken ornament to the gallery for a communal repair session grounded in kintsugi—the idea that damage and repair belong to an object’s history rather than needing to be hidden.
Part practical workshop, part storytelling ritual, the session considers the deep time of everyday things: the geological origins of plastic, the cultural life of ornaments, and the intimacy of objects kept, broken and kept again. Repair becomes an act of attention directed at the overlooked.
Saturday 10 October
Session 1: 10.30am–12.30pm
Session 2: 2.30–4.30pm
$10 + booking fee • Bookings essential • 10 places per session
All ages welcome; children under 10 must attend with an adult.
