The Bell is a large-scale painting of a Christmas tree with baubles and decorations hanging from its dripping branches. Vertiginous in its composition, the work depicts a surreal mixture of scenes and figures, both real and imagined, seen by the artist as he drove through Essex in 2025, at the height of nationalist protest action against hotels used as asylums for migrants in the UK. At once a painting and many paintings, the work introduces Lewis’ use of compositions-within-compositions as a pictorial device, allowing simultaneous perspectives and nonlinear narratives to link and unlink across the picture plane. Like rabbit holes, each bauble is a perfectly formed capsule of hysterical anger, malaise or disaffection; TOWIE icon Gemma Collins rubs shoulders with a masked protestor holding a lit flare, whilst a man wearing a red cap that says ‘Make Epping Great Again’ holds up a large wooden cross like a stake. Taken together, an incisive portrait of modern Britain emerges, unified by Lewis’ totemic tree and its meticulously stamped branches. ‘I think The Bell is an important and significant painting that reflects the social, political and economic changes that are happening right now,’ says Lewis. ‘It is just a tiny snapshot of various small fires simmering in the UK, Europe, and the wider world in general.’