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LBU scholarship recipient Rafael Pérez Evans launches his exhibition "Handful" in Leeds
Rafael Pérez Evans was among 30 participants in New Contemporaries, 2019 a show at Leeds Art Gallery. The organisation supports emergent art practice from British Art Schools.
Director of New Contemporaries Kirsty Ogg was keen to involve LBU in a legacy project, so there would be an ongoing presence of the event, long after the touring exhibition had moved on.
This is when the scholarship idea was conceived by LBU Professor, Simon Morris and the Director of the Henry Moore Institute, Laurence Sillars.
Professor Morris said: “We both wanted the scholarship to be of real value and use to the artist so we made a £5,000 award that included teaching experience on the undergraduate BA Hons Fine Art course, a travel scholarship, free accommodation at the HMI’s flat during their residency, access to our specialist workshops, an honorarium and an exhibition in Gallery 4 at the Henry Moore Institute.
“Kirsty, Laurence and I selected the first artist, Rafael Pérez Evans who has gone from strength to strength. His exhibition at the HMI has been expanded and with the international art media (Studio International) tracking his progress with interest, he looks set for a very bright future. This is one artist to watch.”
“Handful” is that very exhibition and Pérez Evans’ first solo show in the UK. Its focus is on how farming has become all but invisible to the city; by bringing the rural into an urban space, he responds to the increasingly distant relationship between consumers and food producers.
There are three new works, including a monumental sculpture outside the Henry More Institute in the centre of Leeds. “Mountain 2021” uses two full-sized grain silos. Their stark, functional, yet also highly sculptural forms give immediate human scale to industrial food production.
In contrast “Handful 2021” is a simple wooden shelf inside the Institute which carries just one handful of grain and explores the tension between basic human needs and overproduction in agriculture.
Pérez Evans said: “I'm thinking about our tender bodies, our stomachs, our mouths…how much ‘fuel’ we really need, what fits in our hands and stomachs.”
A spirit of protest is never far from his work. As a child in a farming community in Spain he witnessed vast quantities of lemons being dumped in demonstrations against their devaluation according to market forces.
He has followed similar gestures repeated throughout the country, with different foodstuffs, from tomatoes to milk, being dropped and spilled. These visual disturbances have articulated farmers’ anger and frustration to politicians more potently than words.
This unique language of protest through produce demonstrates the sculptural and poetic potential of food and is something Pérez Evans explores in “Lake 2021”. This sees the flooding of one of the Institute's former domestic spaces with milk, a gesture that recalls the aftermath of such uprisings.
Speaking to LBU, Evans said: “I’m so appreciative of the Leeds Beckett scholarship which has been a big stepping-stone in my career, supporting me to build more ambitious work, some of it in public spaces. It’s been an absolute pleasure to come back to Leeds and also to meet some of the faculty and Professor Simon Morris at the opening. I am so grateful to have been given this opportunity, it’s been an incredible gift to be able to build research and an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute.”
Rafael Pérez Evans: Handful is presented at the Henry Moore Institute with the collaboration of the Instituto Cervantes London.
The exhibition runs from 18 May – 29 August 2021.