Garth Evans – interview: ‘There has to be the sense that the physicality of one's being is engaged’

In the lead up to his 90th birthday, the sculptor talks to Sam Cornish, curator of A Place in the World, his current exhibition in Mexico, about the role of colour in sculpture, the necessity of working without concern for an audience’s reaction and allowing a lack of control into the process of making

Garth Evans was born in Stockport in 1934 to a Welsh family. After studying at the Slade School of Art, he worked in London, establishing himself as a significant artist and teacher, particularly at St Martin’s School of Art, where he developed the radical and now infamous course known as The Locked Room. The art historian Penelope Curtis has described him as a “missing link” in postwar British sculpture, rooted in the art of the 1960s but anticipating the sculpture of Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg and Antony Gormley in the 1980s. His art also connects to the conceptual and socially engaged practices of the 1970s as well as the broader international story of constructivism. He moved to the United States in 1979, teaching for many years at the New York Studio School. He continues to work in Upstate New York. Garth Evans: A Place in the World at Fundación Calosa in Irapuato, Mexico, is a condensed survey of sculpture from the 1960s until the present, curated by Sam Cornish.

Garth Evans with Sam Cornish, curator of A Place in the World, Fundación Calosa, Irapuato, Mexico, 2024. Photo: Iván Rmz.

Evans has complex, conflicted thoughts about abstract sculpture’s relationship to an audience and its role in society. Modern sculpture’s purposelessness, without commemorative or didactic function, brings freedom but also the threat of redundancy. How to make sculpture, with its need to occupy space, when it has no certain place in the world? This doubt, combined with a determination to continue to make despite doubt, has underpinned a career as a sculptor and teacher, now in its eighth decade.

Garth Evans. Party Piece, 2024. La Perla, Guadalajara, Mexico. Painted steel, approx 1100 x 900 cm. Photo courtesy Garth Evans.

A Place in the World provides a counterpoint to Evans’s recent engagement with public sculpture. He has discovered and re-sited a 1972 public sculpture in Wales, a project that has generated two small books and a successful play. A new public sculpture commission for Guadalajara, Mexico, will be unveiled during the run of A Place in the World. Alongside the exhibition at Calosa will be a display of works on paper by Evans from throughout his career. This display will emphasise the experimental side of Evans’s drawing practice, its merging of figurative and abstract language and demonstrate his physical and imaginative approach to the creation of sculpture. 

A Place in the World takes place in the lead-up to the artist’s 90th birthday. It shows how Evans has responded to sculpture’s dilemma not with polemics but with poetry, a physical poetry arising in the space between our bodies and the humdrum objects that surround us. The purposelessness of modern sculpture plays out in the formal dynamics of his art.

Installation view, Garth Evans: A Place in the World, Fundación Calosa, Irapuato, Mexico, 2024. Photo: Iván Rmz.

Across 10 sculptures, we see Evans working with precision and fastidiousness, yet also embracing caprice, the unexpected or hard-to-understand move. Caprice alerts the viewer to the strangeness of sculpture, while formal precision acts as justification, carefully fitting sculpture into existence. We create and arrange objects and environments to give constancy and stability to our lives, that might otherwise be experienced as formless and chaotic. But if objects and environments are not to stagnate and stultify, they need to provide space for change and for the exercise of the imagination. That Evans can embrace this conundrum is part of his sculpture’s humanity.

Garth Evans: A Place in the World
Fundación Calosa
Irapuato, Mexico
4 May – 30 August 2024

Interview by SAM CORNISH
Filmed by IVÁN RMZ
Edited by MARTIN KENNEDY