Nick Evans is the fourth artist and the first sculptor to participate in the Artist Residency Programme based at number 5, Porthmeor Studios. One of the new generation of artists trained at Glasgow School of Art, his latest work engages with the material and practices involved in the creation of the art object and its continued function as a tipping point of critical debate amongst practitioners.
Employing a range of media from fibreglass resin, steel, poured and painted aluminium and ceramic, his intuitively constructed, quasi-figurative abstract forms have immediate visceral energy. But the vitality of Evans' gestural forms is as much achieved through a joy of making as through a radical sampling and remixing of twentieth-century Western aesthetic strategies: constructivism, cubism, art informal, abstract expressionism, pop and graffiti art, to name but a few.
In Evans' fusion of contrary styles and periods, his work prompts the question about what sculpture could and should be today. He is looking at the relationship between material, its handling and meaning. Artists that have motivated this critical approach towards object-making include Terry Atkinson and Asger Jorn, which in part explains Evans' perverse combination of art political rigour and irreverence, combined with an expressive sensibility rooted in cultural thinking.
