• Animated Jamming

    Date posted: December 29, 2008 Author: jolanta
    My work is fundamentally based on drawing, but this is reinvented through large-scale site-responsive installations, interventions, drawings, and animations. All my work intends to sketch morphing and imaginary environments. For me, the ability to transform is key, and installation allows spaces to become immersive, fragile environments into which the audience can enter. I want the work to be playful and beautiful but undercut by a tension and darker uncertainty. I’ve made a conscious choice to base a contemporary practice in a rural
    location (Cambridgeshire, England), and have allowed the rural to
    impact through the work. Influenced by the overgrown uncultivated
    boundaries of the low, wide-skied landscape of East Anglia, nature is
    consistently themed throughout the work.
    Image

    Sarah Evans

    Image

    Sarah Evans, Extraordinary Encounters. Photo credit: Oliver Hein. Courtesy of the artist.

    My work is fundamentally based on drawing, but this is reinvented through large-scale site-responsive installations, interventions, drawings, and animations. All my work intends to sketch morphing and imaginary environments. For me, the ability to transform is key, and installation allows spaces to become immersive, fragile environments into which the audience can enter. I want the work to be playful and beautiful but undercut by a tension and darker uncertainty.

    I’ve made a conscious choice to base a contemporary practice in a rural location (Cambridgeshire, England), and have allowed the rural to impact through the work. Influenced by the overgrown uncultivated boundaries of the low, wide-skied landscape of East Anglia, nature is consistently themed throughout the work.

    In my installations I use lines of thread, paper shards, and cuts, delicate connecting points of tape, materials that are more akin to collage and drawing than sculpture. It’s with these that I weave and spin impossible spaces. Colliding abstract and representational elements combine to create new and, at times, fantastical environments. There is resourcefulness in the choice of materials, and a handcrafted low-tech aesthetic keeping it close to drawing and allowing a simple honesty to come through. I want there to be a connection to the process of making, although there is transformation I’m not interested in illusion.

    Duration is important within all my work, both conceptually and thematically, whether this is through the ephemerality of building temporary paper installations, or drawing directly onto the wall, or the aim to hold onto, freeze frame, or slow down time. Recent animations create an otherworldly fantastical location that transport the audience from the everyday into an unfamiliar time to reveal an unseen, secret space creating chance encounters—but only for a fleeting moment. I’ve consistently, rejected creating lasting work, avoiding the art artifact, and viewing the work more as an experience.

    Repetition of mark, shape, or form plays out throughout my work. This repetition builds a flow or rhythm, deliberately constructing this augmentation to enable a charged intensity but also underlining an interest in process. A visible labor emerges, rendered futile by the application of the work directly into temporary locations.

    Although recently my focus has been on drawing and animation, I’m constantly drawn back to installation as a medium. Recent animations have been created through a series of changing charcoal wall drawings. These drawings are painfully recorded mark by mark, deleted, reworked, playing out a narrative of nature and science colliding—a narrative that create imaginary “secret machines,” transmitting, trying to communicate. Each frame is deleted to allow the next, the resulting animation becoming the only documentation of the process.

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