‘Lockdown is profoundly inward facing’ – Five Minutes With Lowri Evans

Greg Thorpe

Artist Lowri Evans likes paper so much she has danced on it and set fire to it. Greg Thorpe catches up with the international artist during a lockdown heavy with ideas. 

1.) What artist has most influenced your practice and why?

I could answer this differently every time you asked it. Today, I’m going to say David Shrigley. I saw him talk in a little cinema at Cornerhouse in Manchester when I was a student. I really remember the photos of his projects that happened on the street – like putting up posters for a lost pigeon – and it cracked me up. I think it left me with the feeling that art can be funny and fragile and happen outside.

2.) What is your relationship to paper as a creative material? What draws you to it?

I use it a lot. I like its availability – an everyday item that can be lifted and transformed into art, be it a drawing, collage, prop. In performances, paper keeps cropping up. I’ve sent paper letters to an audience, projected names onto paper and set them on fire, danced on paper with inky feet. A lot of people recognise my work through its handwriting; signs and drawings, which you can’t have without paper. Type is so synonymous with a screen. Paper can be in your hands. This is important to me.

Another key part of my practice is keeping sketchbooks when I’m away from home; they are light, travel well and feel like I have company. They’re on hand if you’re waiting, bored or just have the impulse to draw, write or stick something down. Then, before you know it you have something from nothing or a trace of a time.

3.) Have you been making any art during Lockdown? If so, can you tell us a bit about what you're working on?

Funnily enough, I’m revisiting a decade of sketchbooks, reflecting on and curating them, narrating them into a kind of film. I’ve never done that before, and I’m using PowerPoint, so the odds are against it. But that’s one of the good things about lockdown, there is time and it’s profoundly inward facing. I’ve never stopped, reflected and made like this before.

4.) What are you reading/watching/listening to atm?

 I am reading David Nicholls’ Sweet Sorrow (2020).

I am watching Michaela Coel’s HBO series I May Destroy You.

I am listening to ‘I am Moron’ by The Lovely Eggs. 

5.) If you could travel anywhere in the world, where would you choose?

Italy, with some tomatoes, friends and a swimming pool.

Lowri Evans studied art at Manchester Metropolitan University and now makes art in Manchester and São Paulo. She says, ‘I make intimate art projects in unusual places with complete strangers. Art is my way of saying “Sometimes I feel like this, do you?”’ In 2015 she won a Manchester Theatre Award for ‘The Shrine of Everyday Things’ with Renato Bolelli Rebouças, Rodolfo Amorim and Contact Young Company. She is an associate artist with Eggs Collective, and the international producer for Coletiva Ocupação. Shealso plays in the band Hotpants Romance. Read and follow at www.thelowri.com @thelowri.