Mary Evans was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1963. Aged six, Evans immigrated to London when her mother married an Englishman. Evans studied in the UK and the Netherlands, developing her multi-disciplinary artistic career, which focusses on issues around race, identity, belonging, nationality and gender, via painting, cut paper, installations and vignettes.
The contemporary artist Mary Evans was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1963. Brought up in Benin City, she lived with her parents until her mother decided to relocate, taking young Evans to Lagos. At the tender age of six, Evans immigrated to London when her mother married a local accountant. Since Evans was legally adopted by her stepfather, she gained naturalised British citizenship and grew up in northwest London. The strong bond within the family offered Evans a positive perspective on inter-racial relations. When she was fourteen, the family returned to Lagos for three years, but Evans moved back to the UK after two. Evans subsequently pursued formal education in the UK and the Netherlands, earning a BA in Fine Art Printing from Gloucestershire College in 1985, an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, London in 1991, a Postgraduate Diploma from the Rijksakademie Amsterdam in 1993, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Academic Practice in Art, Design & Communication from University of the Arts London in 2012. In London, she has had studios in Deptford, Elephant and Castle, and Camberwell.
Evans’ oeuvre is diverse, encompassing painting, cut paper, installations and vignettes. As with many contemporary artists, Evans disputes the division made between art and craft. She juxtaposes this separation between art and craft in her European context with the creative ideologies she identifies with from African culture. Her installation-making process, which involves paper cutting and pasting, echoes traditional female activities such as sewing, quilting, and cooking, while she observed that her maternal grandfather was a tailor in Nigeria (Kerman, 2017, p. 108). Evans describes her practice as follows: ‘The images in my work are based on signs, symbols and pictograms culled from popular culture. The imagery and concepts in the work deal with characterisations which are often devised by our society to contain people, sexes and races. I try to synthesise elements of my African background with the European culture of my experience’ (Evans, 1997 quoted in Kerman, 2017, p. 107).
Soon after graduating from Goldsmiths, Evans received the British Airways New Artist Award, facilitating a three-month trip to South America. Her keen interest in Mayan glyphs and symbols led her to study stone carvings across Mexico and Guatemala. This experience greatly influenced her practice: she recognised the essential role and widespread use of graphics and symbols across different cultures and historical periods. The stone carvings of the Mayans and Aztecs further piqued her interest in signs, symbols, and hieroglyphs. Moreover, during her studies at the Rijksakademie, Evans abandoned painting, began working with cut paper, assembling cut-out forms and silhouettes that portrayed diverse gender and racial traits, and re-examined, after her two-year stay in Lagos, her sense of British and African identities alongside the notions of belonging and nationality. Works such as Wheel of Fortune (1997), Scope (2003) - both of which appropriate the female silhouette from William Blake’s 1796 Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave -, and Gingerbread (2012), to name just a few, address themes of the Atlantic slave trade, bondage and oppression. By manipulating typical depictions of men and women from magazines, she has critiqued the arbitrary distinctions made in terms of race and gender. Flicking through magazines, she would find faces of different races, black or white, and then cut and paste the heads onto a racially different body.
During the 1980s, discussions about signs, symbols, icons, the signifier and the signified, dominated art historical writing, with numerous artists adopting a practice that sought to analyse this theoretical relationship and its implications for the visual arts. Evans matured in this postmodern context and her practice is informed by post-structuralist theories. Throughout her artistic journey — transitioning from a formalist painter to a cut-paper and installation artist — Evans has defied pressures to depict a specific community or ideology, or to conform to a media hierarchy advocated in art school. She has continued to produce pieces that invite the audience to examine standardisation, codification and generalisation (Kerman, 2017, p. 138). Evans’ work explores the interaction of the personal with historical narratives and how this nod can articulate acceptance, belonging, prosperity, peace, and elimination of violence. She sees these qualities as having universal appeal and thus aims not just to raise awareness about a specific topic, but also to challenge the divisions that separate us. Evans has exhibited widely in the UK, including at the Arnolfini in Bristol, the South London Gallery, and Leighton House, and internationally. In 2023 Evans held a solo exhibition, GILT at the newly-opened Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art in Cape Town, South Africa. Mary Evans continues to live and work in the UK. Her work is not currently represented in UK public collections.