Business as Usual by Penny Evans

The theme of Material Dialogues for this year’s exhibition, for me, is really business as usual.

Whenever I’m creating, I’m constantly having a dialogue in my head about which materials to use. What wool? What fibre? What combination of materials will give me the finish I’m looking for? Which techniques do I need to use? What happens if…?

This dialogue is a constant part of my working process. One question often leads to another, and ideas can take unexpected, tangential directions. A thought might develop into a sketch, an experiment, or the beginnings of a piece of work that needs further exploration. As I work, I keep a sketchbook with both lined and plain paper close at hand, using it to capture sketches, notes and fleeting thoughts. Getting these ideas out of my head and onto the page allows me to return my focus to the work in front of me, while also creating a record of possibilities for the future.

This ongoing conversation with materials and ideas is fertile ground for my practice and is one of the reasons I tend to work in series. I enjoy developing a body of work that is interlinked, with each piece informing the next, while allowing the work to evolve and take unexpected turns.

My current work for our forthcoming exhibition at St Margaret’s Gallery is called Earth Series and explores my love of geology. The inspiration came from rock formations I encountered while on holiday in Cornwall. I was fascinated by the evidence of the forces that had shaped them: peri-glacial activity, river & coastal erosion, revealing the landscape of today.

These geological processes have become a starting point for my own material exploration. I’m interested not in reproducing the rock formations literally, but in interpreting their structure, movement and texture through textile & paper. The folds, layers, cracks and deposits become opportunities to experiment with fibre, materials, colour and technique.

In this way, the dialogue continues: between landscape and material, between what I see and how I interpret it, and between the ideas I begin with and the unexpected possibilities that emerge as I work.