Jessie Evans

Jessie Evans is an artist whose practice is centred on painting and drawing, with an inclination towards performance and installation. Her work examines the relational lexicon formed by the art object, the artist, and the viewer. It attempts to linger in the space between these finite agencies.

Evans’ paintings move with a light touch between abstraction and representation, creating a world where paint functions both as symboliser and symbolised. She is interested in the tension between painting as illusion and the social, practical roles of paint: to cover, to demarcate, to vandalise. Within her work, abstraction often serves both as an indicator of the properties of paint and as an expression of the artist's hand. Authorship and artistic flair are frequently exaggerated for humour, the canvas becoming a surrogate self: emotive, needy, and attention-seeking.

Evans’ image-making often exploits the emotional capacities of objects, such as paintbrushes, tube carriages, debit cards, and dresses, with subjects tending towards the anthropomorphic. These fantasies of object vitalism engage a fetishistic drive, conflating statements of social identity with modes of consumer culture. Her subjects are made to perform, inhabiting social roles and enacting their own relations, often embodying an emotive or manipulative presence.

Running through her work is a critical engagement with the image as subject matter, favouring a more diffuse logic of painterly reasoning. Her work often functions within series, creating logic through their interdependency. In this way, they could be seen as non-deducible and in contention with the authority of the image. Installation becomes a key strategy, facilitating multiplicity and emphasising the relationships between image and objecthood.