Sarah Evans’ work is fundamentally based in drawing, but this is reinvented through large-scale site responsive installations, interventions, drawings and animations. In installations Evans uses lines of thread, paper shards and cuts and delicate connecting points of tape; materials that are more akin to collage and drawing than sculpture. With these simple materials she weaves and spins impossible spaces in which colliding abstract and representational elements combine to create new and, at times, fantastical environments. There is resourcefulness in Evans’ choice of materials and a handcrafted low-tech aesthetic which allows a simple honesty to emerge.
Duration is a recurrent leitmotif, both conceptually and thematically, whether through the creation of temporary installations from paper or drawing that is applied directly onto a gallery wall or, transversely, the aim to hold onto, freeze-frame or slow down time. This she achieves through animations that create otherworldly, fantastical locations that transport the viewer from the everyday into an unfamiliar time to reveal a secret space where fleeting, chance encounters occur.
Although recently Evans’ focus has been on drawing and animation she is constantly drawn back to installation as a medium – recent animations have been created through a series of changing charcoal wall drawings, painfully recorded mark by mark, deleted, reworked and playing out a narrative. Within the installation format, each drawing, or frame, is deleted to allow the next with the resulting animation becoming the only documentation of the process. The installation becoming merely part of this process.
Experimentations in visual music have led to Evans collaborating with musicians to score her animations. A recent performance and animated installation saw this group improvising live to an animation process in front of an audience.
Wysing Arts Centre
Fox Road
Bourn
CB3 7TX
Cambridge
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Europe
