Redacted 2026

Provoked by the Epstein files and the wider concealment of the truth.

“It is, first and foremost, beautiful to look at.

At a first look Redacted is related to Lewis' superb recent Newspressed series but the overall impact is different.  It jumps out at you rather than pulls you in, and a sense of a powerful gesture of an artwork is already apparent.  Get up close and things are different there too.  The level of skill deployed and the attention to detail is as always with Kate Lewis mind-boggling but here she has left an imperfect low-tech roughness to the surface - made with scissors, paper and glue - telling us that there is nothing sanitised or smooth behind these shapes.

Kate’s 'palette' was made of the pages and pages of black redacted lines from what we have seen of the Epstein Files.  These were given coloured photocopied backgrounds and then cut, chopped, shredded, plaited and collaged into a bouquet.

The heartfelt and eternal gift of flowers held out to you. This is not however a still life and is not ready to be contained in a vase.  It is unresolved and wants you to reflect and dig deeper. There is more to this than meets the eye. 

Flowers, insects and other little critters are everywhere in Kate’s work and it is no surprise that the typically meticulous research behind Redacted was in part informed by a deep dive into the history of flower paintings and particularly the Borough Collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum that ranges from the 17th to 19th centuries. They are nearly all ‘impossible’ in that they are made of flowers from different seasons, have been seen to contain secrets, and they all have black backgrounds. Black signifying power and money. 

 

Unsurprisingly then there's a solemnity to the dark geometric backdrop in Redacted.  For Kate it represents a quilt - a form loaded with two possible connotations - one empowering, one more sinister. Often made by communities of women, quilts can express comfort, love and solidarity, but a quilt is of course though also something that is made to cover up other things.  Powerful men abusing young women.  Epstein was a construction and a protagonist.  A man who made men and was himself made by others.  While those black lines predominate we may never know who made who. A gigantic cover up.

 

A close look at the historic flower paintings and it is not unusual to find a snail either hiding amongst the flowers and insects, or sometimes placed in the foreground. Snails are the good guys/girls for Kate and they show up in Redacted like little slow motion pilots maybe pointing to a way out of these dark times.

 

Work in Progress Photos

  • Epstein email print out

  • Shredded redacted email

  • Fully redacted pages printed on different colour

  • Making the background 'quilt'

  • Palette of redacted sentences

  • The beginning

  • Top left detail

  • Right side detail

The time of the historic flower paintings was also the time of the Enlightenment when many of the systems and values of our contemporary society were established.  Kate sees that time as a pivot point but asks if the existence of something as grim and absurd as the Epstein files is symptomatic of a breakdown in those systems, and a pivot to somewhere else altogether.

Redacted is original and brave work that reflects our times ….. and calls for the truth to be told.”

John Kieffer