We are delighted to welcome multimedia visual artist, musician, and curator, Graeme Mortimer Evelyn, to FSA’s Artist-in-Residence program in Charleston this fall (September–November 2023). He has developed a reputation for creating work that is situated in places of worship, municipal buildings, and sites of memory that reorient these settings and philosophies by engaging input from the local community as a self-described “bridge-builder.” Raised Baptist-Pentecostal alongside Rastafarianism, later converting to Buddhism, Evelyn’s spiritual experiences deeply inform his practice. 

His intention is that his art acts as a catalyst – attracting new patrons and audiences to engage in meaningful dialogues surrounding art and art making processes. His process considers all stakeholders’ needs and aspirations to enable nuanced forms of sharing a particular public space, especially sacred spaces and houses of worship. Based in London and of Jamaican heritage, Evelyn’s varied body of work comments on cultural social identity, the politics of historical entanglements and the psychological sensitivities involved in creating relevant work for spiritual spaces. He describes these narratives forming – “when fragments of relation, memory, society, identity, and modernity, which seem disparate at first, come together to form a whole.”

The focus of this residency will engage Graeme Mortimer Evelyn’s drawing practice and other smaller-scale studio oriented works. During his residency, Evelyn also aims to compose a reflective text that articulates a framework for how artists and institutions might engage sacred spaces for making site-specific work, as well as ways in which spiritual leaders and houses of worship can instigate collaborations with artists to support the creation of contemporary art.