(selected by Donna Lynas)
Line Scape Study, 2007
Sarah Evans' work has a particular lightness of touch. The mesmerising fragility of unexpected and slanting sunlight. Fluttering leaves on a cool breeze that reflect a gentle and sublime moment. Evans freeze-frames an instant of nature rather than design. Located geographically in the rural, the influence of the natural environment is clear. Romanticised maybe, but none the worse for that because nature and Romanticism have held close for a long time.
In large gallery installations we are immersed, and in a moment of hesitation navigate the suspended forms. Frozen, still, a glow from an unseen source above like the warming sun viewed from under a watery surface. For company, glinting shapes coolly observe. Time stops and a clumsy movement through the fragile structure aims not to destroy it. The scale is very much calculated to make us feel like big-footed giants.
Holed up in an East Anglian landscape of low, wide skies and long barren earth. Profoundly influenced by contemporary music culture. Evans has through careful, considered, methodical, slight, repetition, discovered the preternatural ability to slow down time. A learned behaviour for her and not an accepted one.
Much of that repetition comes from re-working of many drawings, where images mutate and over-lay. Evans' work is at a pivotal moment. An altogether appropriate move into animation has allowed her to weave her magic with a restless fluidity illuminated from within, like a candle. Meandering, merging and enveloping, Evans weaves a lyrical spell in all she does.
Not difficult to imagine the lonely studios made of straw, music blaring, images spinning and sliding - a blurring trance-like state of delicate pleasure. But that pleasure goes beyond those four enveloping walls and for a moment, suspends us.
Evans is an emerging artist working from a studio at Wysing Arts Centre (a former farm, nine miles outside Cambridge). She makes large scale site responsive installations, drawings and animations.
Donna Lynas 2007
Sarah Evans: Artist statement
Drawing is the connecting point between my work in all media, which comprises installation, drawing and animation. Core concerns of light, space, movement, and time are each extended through the different properties that these media bring. Drawings allow impossible spaces to grow, with colliding abstract and representational elements that combine to create new and imaginary environments.
Installations are conceived as drawings. At these times the lines and forms move through three-dimensional space to transform the gallery into fragile environments into which the audience can enter. Within animations the drawings move and transform. Implied movement and physical movement are juxtaposed through the different media.
Throughout there is an interest in process with the repetition of a line, mark, or cut creating a flow in the work by which it gradually changes from one form to another with the feeling that this flux creates endless possibilities of reinvention. All media retain strong handmade and gestural elements with a low-tech aesthetic. The work's flaws and imperfections point to the labour and the precariousness of the structures reflect their vulnerability.
Biography
Sarah Evans gained a first class degree in Fine Art at Reading University (1995) followed by an MA in European Fine Art at Winchester School of Art, Barcelona.
Exhibitions include the inaugural group exhibition at Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2008), a solo exhibition at the Margaret Harvey Gallery, University of Hertfordshire Galleries, St Albans (2008), The nothing that is, Red Gallery, Hull (solo, 2006) and Outside the Frame, Phoenix Gallery, 2006.
Evans is one of 24 artists resident at Wysing Art Centre, Cambridge.
www.wysingartscentre.org
February 2008
