Clerk of Mind

Chris Evans's work is characterised by the realisation of unsolicited assignments and evolves through conversations with people from a broad range of professions—selected in relation to their symbolic or public role. Recently this has included the directors of a luxury jewellery company and members of the international diplomatic community. Collaboration becomes entangled along invisible paths of consultation and negotiation, encased in the resulting art objects. Clerk of Mind reconfigures both new and existing works especially for Project Arts Centre.

Housed in a vitrine, a platinum and yellow gold ring with diamonds, sapphires and heliodor—created by fine jewellers Boodles—is displayed on a tablet. Evans gave the press release for the recent Liverpool Biennial to the designers at Boodles and asked them to create a piece of jewelery based on their reading and interpretation of the exhibition's core ideas. These ideas suggested that "bureaucracy becomes a form of comedy, silence becomes a type of knowledge, domesticity becomes a place of pathology."* Responding to this, Boodles made the ring, and Evans made the jesmonite tablet and rosewood vitrine in which it is presented. The imagination of a luxury brand gets mixed up with artistic vision, blurring the roles of everyone involved.

Also on display in the gallery are a series of drawings depicting invasive plant species titled "Diplomatic Letters," solicited from members of the international diplomatic community. Globally rampant and toxic plants are drawn, photographed, inverted and then produced as silver gelatin prints. The photographs have, as their counterpart, a series of sculptural forms titled "CLODS," arranged around raised white platforms and PVC mats. Each CLOD varies in size, has at least one hole, and bears the trace of its facture: the chunk is first modeled in clay, then cast in concrete mixed with marble. Hollowly echoing urban planning, the "CLOD"  mimics the concrete lump left by the removal of a post or a pipe. 

Soliciting the dream life of honchos and henchmen is the crux of Evans's artworks, exhibited in Clerk of Mind. Oblique artefacts emerge from unwieldy social situations that muddle the roles of artist and patron, genius and muse.


*Extract from the press release for the 8th Liverpool Biennial 2014, A Needle Walks into a Haystack, curated by Mai Abu ElDahab and Anthony Huberman.

Clerk of Mind is curated by Kate Strain, and realised with thanks to Assistant Curator Emer Lynch. The artist and Project Arts Centre also warmly thank Liverpool Biennial; Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam; Lab'Bel Collection (Laboratoire Artistique du Groupe Bel) France; and the Carla and Hugo Brown Collection Cobra to Contemporary.


Chris Evans (born 1967, Eastrington) lives and works in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Untitled (Drippy Etiquette), Piper Keys, London (2014); CLODS, Diplomatic Letters, The Gardens, Vilnius (2014);CLODS, Diplomatic Letters, Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam (2012); Goofy Audit, Luettgenmeijer, Berlin (2011);The Cell That Doesn't Believe In The Mind That It's Part Of, Marres, Maastricht (2010); I Don't Know If I've Explained Myself, Mala Galerija, Ljubljana (2010); and Take A Bureaucratic Bow, Objectif Exhibitions, Antwerp (2009).

Evans's work has also been included in group exhibitions including Regenerate Art, Kunstverien Munchen (2014); A Needle Walks into a Haystack, Liverpool Biennial (2014); Bourgeois Leftovers, de Appel Arts Centre (2013); Specific Collisions II, Marianne Boesky Uptown Gallery, New York (2013); Radical Conservatism, Castlefield Gallery, Manchester (2013); The Narrators, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2013);Surplus Authors, Witte de With, Rotterdam (2012); and The indirect exchange of uncertain value, Collective Gallery, Edinburgh (2011). In 2012 a monograph on the artist was published by Sternberg in conjunction with his exhibitions at Marres and Objectif Exhibitions. Chris Evans is represented by Juliètte Jongma, Amsterdam and Lüttgenmeijer, Berlin.


Project Arts Centre is a multidisciplinary arts centre in the heart of Dublin, Ireland. The visual arts programme presents and commissions new exhibitions with leading artists from around the world. The 2014 programme has included solo exhibitions by Barbara Bloom and Hadley+Maxwell, a group exhibition The Centre For Dying On Stage #1 curated by Kate Strain, as well as collaborations between Céline Condorelli& The Company, and Eva Koťatkova & Dominik Lang—whose exhibition Wasteland will travel to five regional art centres throughout 2015. During 2014, the gallery also hosted the four-part screening and lecture programme TV Museum: The Mini-Series, by Maeve Connolly. For January 2015, Project Arts Centre is delighted to announce a new commission and solo exhibition by Irish artist Garrett Phelan titled A VOODOO FREE PHENOMENON, curated by Tessa Giblin. 

Admission to the visual arts at Project Arts Centre is always free. 

Project Arts Centre is core funded by the Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, and Dublin City Council.