Toronto artist Clarissa Lewis should be declared the unofficial poet laureate of the Leslie Street Spit, but she probably wouldn’t take the credit.

For more than 10 years, she has remained invisible. In fact, it’s only now that Lewis is reluctantly revealing her identity, just as an exhibition of her photographic work opens Friday at Galerie Centrum in Graz, Austria, bringing a little east-end Toronto magic to Europe. (It was Lewis’s husband, Paul, who contacted the Star without her knowledge.)

In 2017, the Star revealed that artist Robert Zunke was creating structures out of discarded materials at the Spit. But by the time the story ran, Ports Toronto had already demolished his work — including an elaborate complex that had curvy walls, granite benches and walkways winding down to the lake — citing safety concerns.

Until now, Zunke had no idea that Lewis was his anonymous collaborator at the Spit. Her photos are the only thing that remains of this unique collaboration.

The Spit, developed in the 1950s through lake infilling, doubled as a dump site for construction and demolition materials for decades before it was designated an environmentally significant area and migratory bird stop. For some, the piles of crumbling bricks and jagged rebar represented an eyesore. Others couldn’t see past the danger of the sliding concrete hills. But for Lewis, and others who she refers to as “Spit people,” this place represented an epicentre of creativity.

At the crack of dawn so as not to be detected, Lewis would hop on her bike from her home in the Beach and ride to the waterfront site.

She followed the same complicated ritual each time, ducking around the locked gate into the deconstructed city. It’s a pattern she later realized reminded her of growing up in the rubble of postwar Berlin. As a daring girl on a bike, she’d ride like a tiny banshee, charming the Russian soldiers to let her past the checkpoint into East Berlin to visit her grandmother.

Lewis began photo-documenting the found-material sculptures that would pop up anonymously around the Spit. As a former psychology student, she adheres to Carl Jung’s belief that creative drive is a human instinct, and here she joyfully witnessed this purest expression of creativity.

“In a gallery, in a studio, there are all kinds of other parameters at work. There’s money, there’s critics,” Lewis says. “There’s fame; there’s all of the things that are attached to making art. But in a location like this, people go out and don’t think of anything else.”

Soon Lewis was inspired to write poetry, or what she calls “story conversations,” on pieces of stone and marble, responding to these makeshift sculptures. Sometimes she would ruminate on a physical attribute, like a tower that appeared as if it was wearing epaulettes. She would give the structures names, like the google-eyed monument with the rusty hair she referred to as Janus, the two-faced Roman god.

“I would leave the writing behind in such a way that it would be happened upon or discovered,” Lewis says. “It would require a curious mind to be walking around the structure or investigating a bit more to discover it.”

But strangers did catch on and began anticipating her words, leaving her slabs of scrubbed-down tumbled marble as makeshift tablets that perfectly held ink without ruining her pen nibs. A few times she was gifted Sharpie markers. Some mornings, Lewis would arrive to discover her writings had been moved and transformed into new works, like the time she found her series of triangular pieces of marble placed carefully around a makeshift fire pit.

After a generous soul left her two five-dollar bills, she scoured subway stations looking for the perfect busker to give the money to. She found him behind a keyboard, playing soft jazz.

“Spit music,” Lewis says.

For the most part, Lewis had no clue who built the sculptures or who was reading her words. But in 2012, she began noticing a series of ambitious architectural structures in a remote, hard-to-access area of the Spit that were clearly built by the same pair of hands. She was stunned by the artistry of the towers, some of which rose more than four metres. One had a brick flame erupting from its top. There were staircases and arches and benches in this Camelot, an ephemeral kingdom of concrete.

Upon closer inspection, Lewis realized the builder used dry construction methods similar to the ancient Romans. Everything was held together not with mortar, but with shims of concrete and a deep understanding of engineering principles.

It was the first time Lewis decided to directly contact an artist. She left a note in a plastic bag, which she signed as “the Stealth Art Collective” — thinking this was a smart way to hide her identity — asking for permission to use photos of this work in case she ever had an exhibition.

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For her show in Austria, Lewis selected a small group of her more than 5,000 photos of the Spit structures, accompanied by images of her writing. Although they’re an ocean apart, Lewis hopes that through her work visitors to the gallery will appreciate how rare and special places such as the Spit are.

“It’s like a living archeology,” says Lewis. “There’s a lot of memory buried there. In a conventional archeological setting, you dig down and you find artifacts and cobble together some kind of meaning of what was there. Here, you can create new meanings from the rubble.”