In Kiss Goodbye and Shift Pattern, Lewis uses moths and butterflies to speak to patterns of labour, climate change and the natural environment. Both works depict these pollinators as just fastened together, their wings kept apart, fleetingly kissing; Kiss Goodbye depicts two now-extinct species - the Essex Emerald Moth and the Black-Veined White Butterfly - surrounded by inky darkness, distilled into their contrasting colours of viridian green and opalescent white. In Shift Pattern Lewis faithfully renders the kaleidoscopic and psychedelic natural colouring of the two insects, remarking that they are ‘more unusual, mind bending and sophisticated than anything I could have thought up or imagined.’

‘Besides extinction, Kiss Goodbye references a revolving door, a distorted silhouette of an hourglass, losing time and also blue collar workers,’ says Lewis. ‘My parents and friends’ families I grew up with, whose households worked around the clock, on 12 hour day and night shifts…One would come home and kiss the other goodbye as they entered and the other slept or left the house. People who work in factories, clean offices, work in hospitals, factories, drive produce in lorries around the U.K. - these people are like pollinators and end up the same: extinct, dead.’

A third small painting, Night Shift, strips even the ectoplasmic green from the insects’ wings; rendered in shades of mauve and muted purples, once more Lewis depicts two moths just touching each other, their antennae delicately crossed. ‘Night Shift has a ghostlike quality, an odd glow, like fireflies and faint drawn lines,’ says Lewis. ‘Like tracing one’s veins with a finger over the body, the parameters of the skin.’