Camilla “Cammy” Lewis

Camilla “Cammy” Lewis is a Maryland-born artist and maker with deep Dorchester County ties. Her family roots reach to Andrews and Hoopers Island, and her creative work today connects Cambridge, South Dorchester, local art spaces, and the handmade-market world through both visual art and Simon Babycat Soap Co.

Cammy’s artistic background is broad. In biographical notes she supplied for this profile, she describes learning and working across painting, hot glass, printmaking, design, bookmaking as an art form, and metalsmithing and jewelry-making, including work with metals and silver. Long before formal study, she was already drawing and making art; she says she had been doodling since around age 11, but did not seriously begin art classes until Chesapeake College.

Her education carried that interest through several stages. Cammy earned an Associate of Arts degree in liberal fine arts from Chesapeake College, studied studio arts at Salisbury State College in 1997–1998, and later transferred to San Diego State, where she studied printmaking, bookmaking, metalsmithing, and jewelry-making. Around 2000, she says painting opened up more fully for her through experience and canvas.

She later returned to Salisbury University, hoping to focus on printmaking. When that path was not available there at the time, she chose hot glass instead, completing her bachelor’s degree in 2015 at age 40. That decision added another demanding, physical medium to an already hands-on creative life.

Many people now know Cammy through Simon Babycat Soap Co., the Cambridge-based soap and functional beauty-products business she has built since 2016. The company’s handmade soaps, scrubs, lotions, massage bars, and gift items are not separate from her art background; in Cammy’s own framing, the soap is an extension of her glass, acrylic, and design work.

That idea gives the company a useful local meaning. A bar of soap becomes a small piece of functional art — something affordable, scented, visual, and useful. Instead of hanging on a wall or sitting in a case, the work becomes part of everyday life. Cammy has described that appeal plainly: a person can buy a piece of art for a few dollars and use it, with aromatherapy folded into the experience.

Her work also belongs to Cambridge’s wider arts community. Dorchester Center for the Arts lists Camilla Lewis among the featured artists in its Studioworks Artisan Gift Shop, a local and regional artist shop at the center’s High Street location in Cambridge. The center describes the shop as a place for handmade works of art, with commissions supporting its instructional and visual arts programs.

Cammy also continues to make visual art directly. She has been working on an acrylic painting intended for the Dorchester Center for the Arts member exhibit in June, adding a current gallery-centered thread to a practice that has moved through painting, glass, printmaking, design, and handmade goods.

For LifeOnTheShore, Cammy Lewis stands out as part of the Eastern Shore’s working creative community: artists and makers who do not fit neatly into one category, and whose work moves between studio practice, local exhibits, gift shops, markets, and everyday use. Simon Babycat Soap Co. carries that story forward in a form people can hold in their hands, take home from a booth, and use — a practical object with an artist’s path behind it.