Mary Evans was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1963, and immigrated with her family to north London in 1969. After a period of unsettled return to her homeland during her teens, she returned to England to study fine art at Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, and at Goldsmiths College, followed by further study at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam, Drawing on her upbringing and experiences of migration and diaspora, she creates large-scale site-specific works on paper which reflect on histories of imperialism and globalisation, and the interplay between ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’; alongside her art practice, she teaches Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, University of Arts, London.
Mary Evans was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1963. In 1969, she immigrated with her family to England, settling in north London. At the age of 14, Evans moved back to Lagos, where she experienced a sense of displacement and begun to reflect upon her identity, which was marked by cultural hybridity. Between 1982 and 1985 she completed a BA in Fine Art Painting from the Gloucestershire College of Arts and Technology, prior to gaining an MA in Fine Art from Goldsmiths College, University of London in 1989. She subsequently undertook a postgraduate residency at the Rijksakademie, Amsterdam between 1991-93.
Evans held her first solo exhibition at Art & Project, Rotterdam in 1993. Since then, she has exhibited extensively in Britain and internationally, including in USA, Netherlands, Mexico and China. In 1997 she was Iniva Artist in Residence at Leighton House Museum, in Holland Park, London, culminating in a solo exhibition, Filter, where she created a series of interventions which explored the symbols and coded signs embedded in the Museum. She has exhibited works in group exhibitions globally, including 5 Continents and 1 City, Museum of Mexico City, Mexico City, Mexico, 2000; A Fiction of Authenticity: Contemporary Africa Abroad, Contemporary Art Museum St Louis, USA, 2003; Farewell to Post-Colonialism, 3rd Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China, 2008; Towards Intersections, UNISA Gallery Pretoria, South Africa, 2015; Still The Barbarians EVA International, Limerick Ireland, 2016; 11 Bienal Do Mercosul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2018 LagosPhoto, Lagos, Nigeria, 2018; and Paper Routes: Women to Watch 2020, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC, USA, 2020. Her work has been included in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (2021), and she has presented a site-specific installation Saints and Saviours at the John Hansard Gallery at the University of Southampton in 2021. She has held solo shows, Scope, at Café Gallery Projects, London (2001), Meditations, Baltimore Museum of Art (2008) Mary Evans, Sojourn, La Banque Arts Centre, Bethune, France (2019) and Cut and Paste, Tiwani Contemporary, London (2012).
Over her career she has received support from the Dutch Institute, Villa Borghese, Rome, and Veronica Broadcasting Organisation in the Netherlands in 1993, a Henry Moore Fellowship from the Byam Shaw School of Art in 2000, and from the Arts Council in 2005. In 1995 her installation Wall Hanging won the East International prize at Norwich School of Art. She was recipient of the Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship in 2010. In 2013, a research residency from the Du Bois Centre in Accra, Ghana, resulted in the group exhibition Du Bois in our Time, featuring a series of paper cuttings, plates, and silhouettes by Evans. In 2014 she was recipient of the Arts and Literary Arts Residency at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy.
Mary Evans produces large-scale and site-specific works, across various media such as paper, rubber, print, and digital media. Her artistic practise is driven by historical research, which she uses to reflect on how Britain’s social, cultural, and political dynamics are products of its imperial past. Her experience of migration, diaspora and global mobility is a frequent theme within her art. Often working in brown craft paper, many of her works live only within the exhibition, making her pieces as ephemeral as the history which they reference. Mary Evans lives and works in London. Alongside her art practise she is also Course Leader at Chelsea College of Arts, University of Arts, London. Her works are held in UK public collections including the Institute of International Visual Artists (Iniva), London.