ALCHEMICAL IMAGINATION

recent works by Lauren Frances Evans

Cason McDermott Gallery - University of Alabama at Montgomery - Montgomery, AL

October 5 - October 26, 2023

What do you call that thing that is you, and yet something else entirely, inside of yourself and outside of yourself at the very same time? Questions of origin and existence are constantly shaping how I think about my creative work, and my belief is that the work of the artist, and perhaps especially the mother artist, is primarily ontological. Just as the human belly button marks both a connection to and a separation from our physical origins, the work that I make points to a similar simultaneity of opposites, referencing the body’s attraction and repulsion but also the immaterial void of human longing in us all.

Reaching for, grasping at, embracing, probing and prodding, these hands (both attached to my body and depicted so often in my work), they hold so much. As an artist, again and again, I find myself scratching at the surface of various possibilities, and the satisfaction of fingernails caught under the edge of things sensed (though rarely clearly seen) keeps me picking at, peeling back, and digging for more.

These hands. They hold, they probe, they feel for and pick at the surface of something far beyond the scope of this game. What is it, then, to begin again?