Jil Evans - Artist Statement

 

         
I am interested in what is called the “emergence” of aesthetic experience and creativity.  There is a lot of work being done right now by philosophers and evolutionary biologists in the attempt to account for our experience of beauty and ugliness, values, ethics, and even consciousness itself. (As seen in the popular publications by Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins, and Lynn Gamwell’s Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science and the Spiritual Princeton, 2002, for an art historical perspective).  As a visual artist who has long been interested in how meaning is made and derived from the process of visual abstraction, I am very excited about the possibility for artists to contribute substantially to this on-going debate.

In the series Natural Parables, I have looked at a bouquet of snapdragons.  Without pre-conceived intentions, I began to photograph the bouquet and make drawings from observation.  Over time, the bundled and fisted flowers turned into these paintings.  I think of them as figurative narratives with cause and effect relations, carrying the energy of sometimes violent and darkly humorous foibles in form, an echo from the natural world; hence the punning title “Natural Parable”. The “Dutch Opera” series continues this exploration through a series of studies of Baroque Dutch still-life paintings by artists such as Jan Weenix and Willam van Aelst, found in the famous Daisy Linda Ward Collection in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England. Sketching the structures of these paintings I found the same ecstatic energy of the enormous ceiling paintings in Rome.

I will continue to explore in a series of drawings and paintings the proliferation of possible forms that grow out of close observation of natural phenomena (i.e. how is it that an abstraction of plant forms can evolve into animal-like formations complete with intentional-looking actions? Is it mere projection, or is there an underlying unity to living forms?) While working with Darwin on botanical experiments, Thomas Farrer reported to Darwin that the climbing plant passifloras “seek & find & hold on & pull up like an animal”.  What new content is then “read into” the image as a result of the new abstraction? How far can one deviate from the original source before any connection seems meaningless?   I plan to use vegetation and geological formations found in two sites that had a large impact on the evolutionary theories of Darwin in the 19th century, found on the Galapagos Islands, and at his last home in England where he worked on his barnacle studies and plant experiments, at Down House in Downe, Kent. 

I think this exploration of the imagination has the potential to put into tangible form the vexing tensions that arise from unanswered questions about the role of the imagination in human consciousness.  It is a timely discussion as our culture is being confronted with rapid changes and discoveries in genetic biology and neuroscience.  The role or value placed on the human imagination, and even aesthetics, figures largely in how we evaluate the direction and ultimate meanings within scientific inquiry, and all of our endeavors.