Julia Crabtree and William Evans' work incorporates a breadth of materials and modes of making from casting and glass-blowing to video-making and printing. For each new body of work they initiate a sequence of contained sculptural experiments. The artists allow the fallibilities of collaborative working and the risk of failure inherent to their materials to inform the final object.

The need to touch and understand the world through its things, when most information arrives via screens, underpins Crabtree and Evans’ experimental and playful approach. Entering this exhibition requires walking upon the carpet of Gullet 2016–21. The printed image comes from a simulation of a smoke-filled room, now stripped of its digital slickness and transferred onto a malleable, physical surface. Acting as a threshold to the exhibition, the part-sculpture, part-pedestal also reveals the duo’s interest in scenography and the collision of real and digital experience.

Embracing the ‘errors’ and ’mishaps’ of their working processes, along with off-kilter colours, Crabtree and Evans seek an alternative to recognised systems of perfection, taste and the myth of the artist genius. In a new body of ceramics, which appropriate mass-produced goods designed to support the body, the cracks and collapses triggered by casting, firing and glazing have all been retained. In another new series, blown glass sculptures are pushed to their material limits with extreme heat, gravity and the artists’ own collaborative decision-making central to their process.

In the video installation Crutch 2017-21, a projection shows bodily indentations being made by an invisible force into a soft, tactile base. Whatever their chosen material, Crabtree and Evans’ works speak of the body without ever depicting it. Interested in systems and ecologies, the exhibition as a whole offers a landscape of ecosystems which, as they say themselves, ‘is exactly what the body is’.

About the artists

In conversation with Julia Crabtree and William Evans Learn more about the artists in this Q&A with the exhibition's curator, Laurence Sillars (Head of the Henry Moore Institute).

Crabtree and Evans were the recipients of the Nina Stewart Residency award at South London Gallery, the Mary Hofstetter Legacy Scholarship for the New Materiality residency at the Banff Centre, Canada and are Wysing Arts Centre residency alumni.

They are currently working on a garden commission for Flat-Time House with Alice Hattrick. Recent commissions include Gulch, exhibited at the Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff and Crutch shown as part of Maximum Overdrive at Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea. Solo exhibitions include Cell Project Space, London, South London Gallery and Legion TV, London.

Films

Find out more about the artists, their work and the exhibition in these short films:

watch now

Artists Julia Crabtree and William Evans tell us how they want to give visitors an alternative viewing experience and why they like to avoid displaying their work on plinths.
Video credit: Nick Singleton

Online events

A programme of free online research events accompany the exhibition, investigating process-based sculpture practice. We will be speaking to artists, writers and curators on topics such as the importance of touch, art's relationship with nature, and the necessity of experimentation and risk.

3 November - Art and Ecology

1 December - Lecture: Dr Laura U. Marks

12 January - Readings: Alice Hattrick, Daisy Hildyard, Daisy Lafarge

Booking

Booking tickets to visit our galleries is no longer necessary, though we advise groups of six or more book in advance to make sure there is space for you all to visit the galleries at the same time.

You can book for our online events by following the links above.