Archive
Lucy Evetts
The Voice Inside My Head
04.05.2024 – 14.07.2024
Resisting a settled chain of connection, an agile matrix of images takes hold within Lucy Evetts’ The Voice Inside My Head. Proud Alsatians, half made-up clowns and portraits of extra-terrestrial figures are just some of the characters brought together in its web of cautious signage, private domestic moments and more public, nocturnal tableaux.
Dwelling in a sense of flux, a series of contrasts and juxtapositions populate the gallery. Restful cuddles with pets are in close contact with high-octane fire trucks, blurred night drives and signs alerting to ‘road closures’, ‘wet floors’ or ‘naked flames.’ Igniting this push and pull between safety and danger, an anxiousness pulses through this painted cohort. Playing with scale, mimicry and absurdist contradictions, flecks of humour pepper this bed of uneasiness.
Switching between interior and exterior spheres, the paintings depict both stock images gathered online by Evetts and more intimate, personal matter. No effort is made to distinguish or categorise these multiple opposing fields, instead a host of divergent moods and pathways emerge. Echoing rapidly evolving trains of thought, the exhibition revels in the unexpected affinities that surface within these paintings.
Like cultivating a photo album or a mental scrap book, Evetts will start to garner a lexicon of imagery and motifs. Rapidly transferring photographs to oil paintings, the smaller works are realised in single days, whilst the bigger pieces take a matter of weeks. In this body of work, four wheeled vehicles and four legged friends continue to reappear, with the latter evading harm and the former emitting startling hues and chroma. Evetts will mull over potential images internally, before embarking a search online to find these desired scenes. Although much of the source material in this show is claimed from unknown digital space, Evetts’ brush repatriates these images, imbuing them with distinct emotional clarity.
In his essay ‘Rhetoric of the Image’, Barthes labels photographs as occupying a kind of ‘Edenic’ state, marvelling at their ‘utopian’ character and ‘analogical nature’, which allows them to convey a ‘message without a code’. [i] He considers intricacies of colour and cropping that a photographer will work with, yet in comparison to drawings or paintings, he examines how the presence of a creator, or a particular narrative is less present within a photo. Working from a monitor in the studio, Evetts traverses these two visual pools that Barthes outlines, overseeing this transition from photo to painting. Channelling this ‘Edenic’ quality that Barthes speaks of, Evetts inscribes these photographs with emotive accents—casual car wash vistas become enigmatic thresholds, laced with mystic and melancholic blues, or a paper plane becomes a radiant emblem, pounced and ready for take-off.
Capturing these fleeting moments, Evetts’ paintings carry immense sensorial precision. Catching trails of light left behind a speeding car, wind contorting locks of hair, or steam lacing mirrors, Evetts sets about suspending moments in time. In his 1931 lecture ‘The Live Creature’, cultural theorist John Dewey, re-envisioned art as a living, breathing, ever-changing experience, reanimating the static conception of artworks. He champions art which connects with everyday experiences, questioning why ‘life is thought of as an affair of low appetite’ and he speaks of the resonance of specific ‘space-time-compositions’—the happenings from our daily lives which ought to be heralded alongside the canon of classical imagery. [ii] These everyday ‘moments and places’ he argues, ‘are charged with accumulations of long-gathering energy’. [iii]
This accumulative energy is palpable in each of Evetts’ paintings, with each work composting both personal and wider-cultural strata embedded in everyday imagery. We all have knee jerk reactions to an image of a deer caught in headlights or a wailing newborn, and these associations mix and mingle with our present interactions with the work. Encountered collectively, this charge seems to multiply and refract, ricocheting from one canvas to the next.
Whilst observing these pieces, a feeling of being observed is also present. The beguiling eyes of E.T. meet visitors warmly, as do enlarged, stretched eyes of the artist, peeking out through self-portraits of varying proportions. Some of these perceptive organs are framed in face paint, taking on a character separate to the skin beneath, whilst others stare back with still vulnerability, caught in moments of privacy. Moving through these fields of vision, the dynamic between perceiving and being seen becomes muddled. Digging into the particular character of self-portraiture, Jennifer Higgie remarks that a self-portrait is not only ‘a description of concrete reality, it’s also an expression of an inner-world’. [iv] As viewers of Evetts’ work, we are granted entry into this interior space, lit with neon hues and graced by canine companions.
During a studio visit with Evetts, she introduced me to Sylvia Plath’s 1959 poem ‘The Eye-mote’. In this short poem, the narrator recounts the details of a splinter entering their eye, distorting their sight. From stanza to stanza the discomfort increases, with the wooden speck ‘needling it dark’, leaving ‘small grain burns’, until the persona succumbs to wearing the ‘present itch for flesh’.[v] The bucolic scene introduced at the start of this tale becomes morphed, misshaped and strangely beautiful. Evoking the haze of memory, this splinter brings about new manifestations of familiar terrain.
Evetts continually returned to this poem whilst developing these paintings, investing in Plath’s meditations on recollection, embodiment and perception. The arena of eyes, car windows, puddles and mirrors concocted by Evetts dives into these ideas, conjuring a highly sensitive environment. Undercutting this introspection, the painted signs, tools and precautionary objects dotted through the space inject some bizarre humour into the presentation.
Adopting a tromp l’oeil approach, ladders, fire extinguishers and wet floor signs are brought to life in 1:1 scale—flipping the usual associations of this classical technique. No ornate mantelpieces, goldleaf frames or towering columns are manifested, instead a host of rudimentary objects is gifted this precision and grandeur. Signs are made public to warn of temporary potential hazards, but the permanent fixture of Evetts’ warnings makes them farcical. Overzealously steering towards caution, duplicate ladders, fire exits and extinguishers are crafted to join Flatland’s in house safety fixtures. All at once ludicrous and laughable, the sensation of threat on the horizon is nonetheless unavoidable.
The relationships between neighbouring paintings in this presentation are joyfully dysfunctional. Traffic lights, self-portraits, car wash brushes or ladder steps may not appear as likely companions, but a distinct emotive sensibility glues these works together. In Affinities, Brian Dillon surveys the elasticity of this term, tracking its morphing etymological lineage and its ability to magnetically bind separate entities. Questioning the shape-shifting capacity of this word, he ponders, ‘is affinity a formality or a feeling, a physical state or a psychic one?’. [vi] Affinities do have this particular ability to bridge both material and immaterial matter and this quality is abundantly clear within Evetts’ paintings—as seemingly disparate imagery becomes woven into an ever-evolving internal cacophony. Switching between stillness and dynamism, organic and artificial imagery or polar sensations of safety and peril, boundaries between the internal and the external become irrevocably muddied. Evetts treads between ‘physical’ and ‘psychic’ worlds as Dillon puts it, reassigning the gallery environment as a mental space to step into, admitting access to Evetts’ wonderfully scatological thoughts and fears.
Text by Fran Painter-Fleming
[i] Roland Barthes, ‘Rhetoric of the Image’ in Barthes, Roland, Image, Music, Text (St. Ives: Fontana Press, 1977). p. 42.[ii] John Dewey, ‘The Live Creature’ in Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1980). p. 22.[iii] John Dewey, ‘Having an Experience’ in Dewey, John, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Books, 1980). p. 42.[iv] Jennifer Higgie, The Mirror and the Palette (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2021). p.21.[v] Sylvia Plath, ‘The Eye-Mote’, Plath, Sylvia, Collected Poems, (London: Faber & Faber, 1989). p. 109.[vi] Brian Dillon, Affinities (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2023) p. 60.
Lucy Evetts (b.1989, Gloucestershire) lives and works in Kent. Lucy graduated from The Royal Academy Schools, London, UK in 2018. Recent exhibitions include: Limelight, The Residence Gallery, London (2023); No one owns the moon, The Function Suite, London (2023); Born to make you happy, The Residence Gallery (2022); Your heart to a dog to tear, Take Courage Gallery, London (2022); Split Open, The Split Gallery, London (2022); Best in Show, Eve Leibe Gallery, London (2021); Nourishment II, V.O. Curations, London (2021); Quarantine Arts, Online Exhibition, (2020); Picture Palace, Transition Gallery, London (2020); Pets, The Other Art MA (Toma), Southend-On-Sea (2019); When Species Meet, Transition Gallery, London (2019); Disir, TM Lighting, London (2019).