Tiwani Contemporary is pleased to present Cut and Paste, artist Mary Evans' first solo exhibition in London. Evans presents a new large-scale installation, cut paper works and a video piece. Foregrounding narratives around migration and displacement, the past and the present coalesce in Evans' artworks and reflect both personal and collective experiences and memories that remain relevant to our contemporary realities.
Mary Evans is one of the most prolific artists of her generation and over the last two decades has garnered national and international recognition for her works made of craft paper. Evans' work prioritises site specificity using the space as a starting point to create Held (2012), a 50ft-wide by 10ft-high wall installation that takes on the monumentality of a frieze. Created with paper, the work consists of generic images of the human form stripped back to pictographic cyphers of naked silhouettes. However, the use of brown paper - instead of the black characteristically or traditionally used for silhouettes - symbolically deprives the figures of their neutrality. Held presents a poetic, multi-layered narrative that references transatlantic mobility, past and present, forced and voluntary, articulating the experience of the diaspora and the inherent vacillation between feelings of belonging and alienation.
Other featured works that expand Evans' repertoire include Recollection (2012), a series of commemorative plates, as well as the Willow Plate series (2012), inspired by the blue and white patterned crockery originally from China yet considered to be 'quintessentially English' domestic objects. Evans states, "Pattern is a strong leitmotif in my practice. However, the work is rarely pure ornament but often reveals the historical, architectural or social threads of its source."
In the video work Liverpool Street (2012), time and space are conflated. How and why does a location in Ghana become named Liverpool Street, after the famous street in London? The piece engages Evans' interest in the legacy of Britain's imperial past and how that legacy impacts Britain's social, cultural and political context today.
An accompanying publication, Mary Evans: Cut and Paste, is available for purchase through the gallery. More information here.