Week 7: Curatorial Analysis – The Lover – Beacon Arts Centre
This solo exhibition, featuring work by artist Lilian Evans, took place in the Beacon Arts Centre, located on the waterfront of Glasgow Port. Spanning wall space from the entrance foyer, the stairs and up to the mezzanine, where the majority of the work is housed. Evan’s work engages with the expanded field of painting, many of her ‘paintings’ featuring little, or no paint whatsoever, instead taking on experimental and structural forms. Evans explores the medium of shaping material in site specific and in situ installations as a form of interaction that gives birth to a romance between herself as the artist, and the material art itself.
Exhibition Photo (2025), Image taken on location by Harry Mayston
Evans’s practice is defined by the experimental ‘non-painting paintings’ that form the majority of this exhibition, and in response to this conceptual dissonance the arrangement of pieces interacts with the architecture of the space in an equally non-conventional way. Works span walls broken up by door frames and opening hallways in confined corners of the centre. The fabric that constitutes the work, a repurposed lorry curtain, is hung precariously above stairs and by ropes, offering the impression of a tension tethered to the wall, as though the transient materiality of the lorry may pull the piece away. I find this conceptually aligns with the geography of the site. Located within Glasgow port, notions of transportation of commodity that are aroused by the material usage of lorry curtains are echoed in the complex moving parts that form the temporary existence of the space at any one time. The shapes that Evans creates take on the structure of sails, echoing her previous work in which wind sails were the primary material. The audience find themselves situated between land and sea with transforming structures that iterate travel beyond the land of the lorry. I had the chance to discuss this with Evans, and brought up this point of enquiry. I was directed to her website where the design becomes an extension of the curation. The archive is formatted with each piece displayed in a parcel, wrapped up and ready for transportation, accompanied by a travel ticket. The transitory nature of the work becomes reinforced not only by the physical site but also framed through the lens of transportation within the documentation.
Lilian Evans, I Think You’ve Made Me Insane, Website Screenshot captured 10/03/2025, Image Sourced from: https://lilianevans.co.uk/archive
Lillian Evans, I Think you’ve Made Me Insane (2025), Image taken on location by Harry Mayston
Action:
This exhibition demonstrates the intertwining of materiality, location, online artistic archiving, and artistic histories in creating a unified audience experience. Though not explicitly stated in every iteration of this curation, the notion of transience and travel is reinforced within all the ways that a viewer would be able to interact with the display pieces.
This research opens up the possibility of additional curatorial resources within my own curatorial project, and that to do this successfully I will need to have a precisely defined exhibition identity that can be iterated across all of the elements of my curatorial project.
Bibliography:
- Beacon Arts Centre(2025). Beacon Arts – Exhibitions. [online] Available at: https://www.beaconartscentre.co.uk/exhibitions/ [Accessed 10 Mar. 2025].
- Evans, L. (n.d.). Archive. [online] Lillian Evans Artist Website. Available at: https://lilianevans.co.uk/select-exhibitions [Accessed 10 Mar. 2025].
- Taylor, F. (2025). The Lover – Gallery Handout. In: Beacon Arts Centre. The Lover Exhibition.
