“Holy Palmer’s Kiss” is a collection of photographic objects gathered and created in an attempt to echo an ineffable emotional state of disorientation, yearning and simultaneous confinement. It is a unravelling web of tension and competing desires, guarded with what it reveals, despite wanting to reveal so much.
Exploring themes such as shame, unstability, desire, touch, stasis, support and ensnarement, the project combines found imagery with Evans’ own contemporary archive of photographs, de-centering their subjects; as well as embracing the poignant emotional resonance that second-hand images can have and, the honesty with which one can speak when they are not solely using their own words, not constructing full sentences, but instead presenting fragments that curl away or peak out from paper cutouts.
Within the display, curves and loops of logic pull together before either scattering into fragments again or becoming entangled with another set of relations. Images brush up against each other, their movements and gestures echoed or resisted. The desire to touch and be touched, and the equal desire to not as well as its connotations, is a core point of tension within the project, one that is echoed materially and through some of the methods of production. Silver gelatin contact prints, digital prints on bark, book clippings and layered cutouts all involve a tactile and proximate engagement with the images as objects, that have a scale relative to the hand to hold (or shield). Hesitation is embedded into the work, but a tentative desire to find a method for expression and enquiry made the work a necessary creation and construction.