Natasha Evans, B.1978 Mutare, Zimbabwe, raised and living in Lusaka, Zambia. She has a BA in Illustration from The Arts Institute At Bournemouth, UK. Natasha has taken part in multiple group exhibitions and last year November 2024 she showed a collection of work in her fifth solo exhibition titled ‘Finding A Softness’. Internationally Natasha has presented works at The Revelation Biennial at the Grand Palais in Paris and is showing works at Africa Basel contemporary art fair in Switzerland during Basel week, June 2025. Her works evolve from abstract concepts grasped from lived experiences, inspired by poetry, nature and the human condition. Her ideas find form in expressive sketchbook drawings, writings, mark making and palette. Conversations and connections come into existence between these myriad components which are layered into finished artworks. Working primarily in mixed media she is influenced by the abstract and figurative movements and uses processes of collage with layers of textile, paper, canvas, and text and photography often are integrated into her paintings, forms and installations. Her assemblage is fragmented to deep greens and earth tones to represent the earth around Zambia, where she confronts a place of belonging, treasure, value and vulnerability. She extracts resources from her physical, social and cultural environment, interested in the interplay of the shared human experience within these.
Artist Statement
I am a woman artist from Africa making work on the continent which addresses ideas about value, ownership, womanhood and human connection. As a mixed media artist, I use principal processes such as layering of texture and imagery but I am passionate about making art that shifts and changes and responds ultimately to changing environments, natural, social, and cultural. I am challenged to use materials purposefully & sensitively because of the weight of the stories they potentially hold.
Making art is a way of making sense of my own sensitivities and emotions that which emerges when contemplating my adult and childhood experiences. I’ve always been urged to respond to these driving factors with physical acts of drawing, painting, photographing, writing and making with my hands. The synthesis essentially releases what has built up inside me so that I can then start responding to the possibilities. I begin by analyzing the elements I have available to me and do with them what feels honest. Even though I do have certain studio practices in place to start a body of work somewhat systematically, the making is always intuitive, reactive, personal, and emotionally charged. Art is my way of communicating the intricacies and nuances between that which is felt so personally and what is shared experience. When it is too complex or uncomfortable, making something new as a response, feels right.
I’m drawn to the softness and lightness up against the robustness and rawness of things. Dualities, dark and light, absence and presence, revealed and hidden become interwoven when my hand and mind engage with gesture, repetition and memory.