Black Bag #5, 2024

Naomi Lewis  

Central to Naomi Lewis’s work is her experience of growing up with a mother who suffered serious mental illness, which affected every aspect of family life. This has led the photographer to examine in her work wider themes of how societal disregard for mothering forms and ways, entangled with our reliance upon them, impacts who we are and how we behave.

Her two recent series ‘Black Bag and My Father’s Eulogy is a Mask explore the anonymisation, abstraction, and psychological survival of the human form across distinct environmental landscapes. By consistently obscuring the face, the work strips the figures of traditional narrative portraiture, turning the body – whether collective or singular – into a sculptural site of performance, constraint, and visceral tension.

At their core, these images confront a profound sense of grief, both personal and cultural, surrounding societal polarisations of the masculine and feminine. The images navigate the pain of these divides, utilising raw physical restriction to mirror internal psychological fracturing.

Through this carnal struggle, the sequence evolves into a ritual of release, moving past rigid structures of identity toward a shared, elemental space of vulnerability and fluid survival.