ALONG CAME A SPIDER
Lauren Frances Evans  &  Stephen W. Evans

September 4 - October 3, 2025

Vulcan Materials Gallery at Alabama School of Fine Arts - Birmingham, AL

This exhibition wonders what might happen if, instead of running, we were to stay.

In Along Came a Spider, artists and life partners Lauren Frances Evans and Stephen W. Evans turn toward the shadows of domestic life—the fears and rituals that inhabit the home, the ruptures and revelations that shape it. The figure of the spider becomes not a threat but a guide, its web a reminder of the hidden threads that bind us to one another.

Lauren’s work traces liminal thresholds—between body and spirit, home and cosmos, birth and death. Felted wool forms like Pupa and My Tuffet, My Cloud hold imprints of bodies, recalling chrysalis, deathbed, and cloud-vehicle all at once. Her video Inner Atmos, Outer Spheres refracts childhood Sunday school songs into floating bubbles, dissonant headspaces where memory, belief, and critique converge. Across sculpture and video, she binds fallen branches, resins, and vaporous imagery into delicate networks that echo fascia, mycelium, and the web of life.

Stephen’s sculptural works hum with the sound of flies and the persistent chirp of crickets, together suggesting presences that dwell at the edge of perception—heard but not seen, unsettling reminders of mortality and unease. Rats in the Attic conjures the restless scurry of anxieties, while his drawings of fallen branches echo Lauren’s gathered limbs, underscoring the tension between what falls and what is raised again.

Together, the artists weave a shared mythology of the everyday—one that mirrors their journeys through parenthood, faith, and the ongoing work of coming of age. Their works wrestle with inherent fears of death and loss, with the unease of raising children, and with the echoes of childhood formation. Yet out of this uneasiness emerges a kind of alchemy: a burning down of what was once inherited, distilled into something more authentic and alive.

If the nursery rhyme imagines flight, fright, and retreat, Along Came a Spider proposes something else: a staying-with. To sit with the discomfort, to follow the thread of curiosity, to see how all things—branches, bodies, beliefs—reflect and refract one another in a shimmering web of life.

Lauren Frances Evans is an artist and educator whose practice investigates the visceral and liminal spaces of the human experience, often through the lens of maternal embodiment, mysticism, and transformation. She holds an MFA from the University of Maryland (2014) and a BA from the College of Charleston. She currently serves as Associate Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Samford University. Her work has been supported by residencies including Franconia Sculpture Park, Elsewhere Living Museum, and Art for Change in New Delhi, India. Locally, she collaborates with Studio By the Tracks and serves on the board of the Alabama Visual Arts Network. More at www.laurenfrancesevans.com.

Stephen W. Evans was born and raised in the Philadelphia area and received his BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of the Arts in 2010, followed by an MFA from the University of Iowa in 2017. A painter at heart, his multidisciplinary work spans painting, object-making, and installation, often exploring themes of memory, mortality, and the uncanny within domestic spaces. He combines constructed forms with altered found materials to evoke presence, absence, and the unseen. More at www.stephen-w-evans.com.

Evans and Evans live and work in Birmingham, Alabama, with their two daughters, Agnes Prairie (9) and Edie Moon (4.5).