About the artist:

Graeme Mortimer Evelyn’s varied body of work comments on cultural identity, politics, and language. 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.” His works have been displayed and collected in Princeton University Center for African American Studies, Cornell University, Kensington Palace, The Royal Commonwealth Society, Museum in Docklands, Gloucester Cathedral, Watershed, and M-Shed Bristol.

A multi-media visual artist, musician, and curator, Evelyn has developed a reputation for creating work that is situated in municipal buildings, sites of memory and places of worship that subvert these settings and philosophies. His intention is that his art acts as a catalyst – attracting new audiences to seek alternative dialogues and challenging questions to enable the democracy of public space. His subversion of the institution does not stop there, as his works often reflect that ‘institution” denotes systems, memorial, edifice, myth, belief, and popular opinion.

Many of the commissioned project work engages with contested histories and heritage, which has often required detailed archival research and an acute sensitivity to collective social issues and ideas. This process is challenging and thought-provoking for both artist and audience, causing to question the essence of what brings people into a conversation with a work of contemporary art.

His use of detailed in-depth subject research creates the framework and give context to his experimental use of varied and diverse mediums, such as the 55min video essay The Two Coins: Meditations on Trade (2007). This poignant, factual and objective work was filmed staging imagined historical reenactments within UNESCO heritage sites and locations in Ghana, Mali, Malawi, and the UK, documenting the dormant history of the Trans – Atlantic Slave Trade as silent meditation.

In 2009, Evelyn was commissioned by M-shed (Museum of Bristol) to subvert historical record. The result of extensive research and an old Chinese gambling table – the museum acquired the large painted relief sculpture, Reading the Riot (Act), a permanent work on display for their contemporary art collection. It is an uncompromising and challenging statement on the long history of British public dissent. Unveiled in 2011; the year of unprecedented rioting in London, Europe, and the Middle East Reading the Riot (Act) became strangely prophetic

In 2011, Evelyn was Artist-in-Residence at St. Stephen’s Church Bristol, commissioned to create a large scale permanent contemporary altarpiece, the Reconciliation Reredos.  Set within one of the oldest churches in Bristol, historically significant as the harbour church that blessed every merchant slave vessel before their voyage; the Reconciliation Reredos is a contemporary artwork of universal reconciliation, that responds to the church’s past, reflects the voices of the city today while representing the potential of the future. The work has established Evelyn as the first-ever British Jamaican Artist to complete such a commission in Europe. The Reconciliation Reredos was recently cited within the Oct 2023 Historic England UK Govt commissioned report, as an example of institutional best practice for responses to contested historical memorials and art works.

He also presented the exclusive solo exhibition Out of Many, One at the Jamaica High Commission during the London2012 Olympics and Jamaica 50 and was the guest curator of contemporary Jamaican film for Afrika Eye 2012 International Film Festival. In 2013/14, Evelyn created the critically acclaimed site-specific installation Call and Responses – The Odyssey of the Moor  – a contemporary response to John Van Nost’s Bust of a Moor (1688) commissioned by Historic Royal Palaces and The Royal Collection Trust – exhibited within the Queens State apartments at Kensington Palace.

In Feb 2015 Evelyn was CoLab Festival Artist in Residence at Trinity Laban Conservatoire for Music & Dance directing an improvisational fusion of automatic drawing with the conservatoires contemporary dance and jazz / classical music students. Recently, Evelyn co-curated the major landmark UK exhibition Jamaican Pulse – Art and Politics from Jamaica and the Diaspora – commissioned by The Royal West of England Academy for June 25 – Sept 11 2016, in partnership with the Jamaican High Commission, National Gallery of Jamaica and The Bluecoat Liverpool supported by Arts Council England.

Evelyn has contributed to panel discussions on A Role of Public Art for  London Festival of Architecture Museum in Docklands, Virtual Migrants Arnolfini Bristol, Caribbean Curatorship and National Identity Bridgetown, Barbados, Curating The International Diaspora Gwangju Biennale, South Korea, Inside London: Art and the Sacred King’s College, London, Holbein at the Tudor Court The King’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace and Memorialisation and the Built Environment University of Dundee. Evelyn has also contributed his experience as a panel judge for the Edinburgh based, John Byrne Artist Award for 2022/23.

In November 2017 Evelyn completed the major London Diocese commission, creating the largest permanent hand sculpted contemporary altarpiece in Europe, The Eternal Engine, for St Francis Church in Tottenham Hale. Since his Reconciliation Reredos Heritage Fund commission for Bristol’s St Stephen’s Church in 2011, Graeme Mortimer Evelyn remains the only British / Caribbean artist to complete two such unique permanent public art legacy works in Europe.

He has recently completed vinyl album cover commissions through this lens for world renowned Jazz Artists – notably the final Dub mix 12inch vinyl covers for the late great Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s collaboration with Swiss Jazz trombonist Samuel Blaser Routes (2023 release) and the debut album for the acclaimed Ukrainian Jazz Harpist Alina Bzhezinska Reflections (2022 release).

Evelyn currently works in his newly constructed and landscaped artist garden studio in South London created throughout the lockdown, continuing to develop his varied and innovative body of works exploring automatic experimental drawing and sculpture informed by his synaesthesia reaction to sound, music and audio and how these responses relate to contemporary religious and secular belief structures. He has also established a new artist project base in Edinburgh.

Evelyn’s first solo exhibition in Scotland, Relics from an Oasis of Good Luck, Feb 2 – Feb 27 2023, was set within Edinburgh’s prestigious Gleneagles Townhouse, presenting a collection of works over a 25yr period selected directly from the artists London home as, “personal visual memories of a very grateful creative life”.

In May, Evelyn contributed excerpts from the updated Directors Cut of The Two Coins: Meditations on Trade (2007) commissioned for Talbot Rice Gallery (Edinburgh University) exhibition event Owning It, and returned to the city in June, commissioned by Edinburgh / Jazz Blues Festival to present workshops of Caribbean percussion to perform during Scotland’s Windrush Generation Celebration.

Evelyn is also currently lead artist commissioned by Edinburgh Jazz & Blues Festival to steer development of the new Edinburgh Carnival Scottish – Caribbean hybrid drum and percussion ensemble Scotland-Yard and join them on the artist festival exchange with Cuban carnival creatives in Santiago De Cuba in July / August 2024. The Directors Cut (2023) of The Two Coins: Meditations on Trade (2007) received its second full screening and keynote presentation in Oct 2024 for The University of Dundee Festival of the Future. The video art essay’s premier screening was held at the College of Charleston South Carolina in Oct 2023.

During his late 2023 residency with the Foundation for Spirituality and the Arts in Charleston, South Carolina, USA, he gave artist lectures and presentations of his varied arts practice for the College of Charleston and the South Carolina State Episcopal Church Annual Convention. In June 2024, Evelyn returned to the city to begin a commission for the South Carolina Episcopal Diocese to create the new permanent contemporary altarpiece, The Calvary Icons, for The Calvary Episcopal Church – the oldest established Black American Church in historic Charleston, as part of a new Creative Resilience initiative.

His observational essays on Contemporary Art and Culture are published with ArtBible online.

Top image: Graeme Mortimer Evelyn, Reconciliation Reredos, 2011. St. Stephen’s Church, Bristol.