ARTISTS TALKING

I create images in which all or parts of my body are fitted into the very fabric of a room or environment. These are usually presented live as performed installations but also exist as photographic works. Often I am almost completely hidden in the recesses and constructed spaces I find within a building: the space under the floor or the flue of a chimney with only part of the body visible, or I am squeezed into holes or gaps in the material structure – skin to brick – my physical contours against those of the architecture. My forthcoming commission for 'Invisible Bodies' at the Arnolfini, works within the constraints of the featureless white box of the gallery and marks a move into the adaptation and construction of structures in relation to the body.

Last year I received an artists' bursary from Artsadmin, which has supported my practice and enabled research into the figure of the anchoress. A medieval female hermit, the anchoress chose to be shut up for life inside a small room attached to a church. This act of living entombment and incarceration is deeply fascinating and disturbing, and mirrors my artistic concerns: the housing of the body in site; the rite of disappearance and loss, and a vision of the sanctity and strangeness of bricks and mortar, anchored by a human presence. In the creation of my body/architectural hybrids I seek to animate the hidden poetic life of a space and also reveal the ambiguous nature of the body, its familiarity and foreignness, its beauty and horror.

People often ask if I ever get stuck, but my naturally slight frame and flexibility mean that although sometimes uncomfortable, I usually find my short-term enclosure in structures rather thrilling, like a game of hide and seek. Only once did I panic, fearing that I really was stuck, standing inside a fireplace. Suddenly realising the total ridiculousness of my situation, I wondered how on earth I would explain myself to a bewildered fireman.

UPDATE 2006
Since this original text was published, commissioned work has included ‘Good his Labour’, performed at the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of Architecture Week 2003, and the ‘Anchor Series’- ongoing site-specific improvisations tailored uniquely to a building or space performed in Finland, Switzerland, Spain and recently for Newcastle upon Tyne’s Baltic and Wolverhampton Art Gallery. I collaborated on a video installation ‘Homeland’ and also participated in ‘Flourish’, a group show in the Czech Republic, exhibiting prints of my performances.
I hope to produce a small publication documenting the ‘Anchor Series’ and also plan to explore working in a rural setting, directing live and recorded image making, using a number of bodies within a landscape.
I will be taking part in SPILL in the spring of 2007, a performance festival for London.

I feel being featured in a-n has brought my work and practice into a wider arts domain.

evedent@hotmail.co.uk www.axisweb.org/artist/evedent