IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNA EVANS

It is of course nicely synchronous that you would choose ‘Muses’ as a theme for the show. Why did that come about?

I have always been very interested in cultural narratives. Myths and legends are vehicles to share meaning and facets of remembrance across generations. I’ve named every painting since the end of 2024 after a character or scenario from Greek mythology. I use them as a naming convention, because Greek mythology is so deep and rich, there is almost always something to mine. I feel it’s a spring that will not dry out. I have always held a deep affinity for the classics and Greek mythology. I find it fascinating how these stories, analogies, lessons sort of echo through the ages, across continents and are paralleled in the stories of other peoples in faraway lands. How they’ve been repeatedly painted and played out as song, and dance in theatre and film.

The last painting I did before starting work for this show was one I called Mnemosyne. Mnemosyne was a Titan and she is the goddess of memory. It was her nine consecutive nights with Zeus that bore her nine daughters. It seemed fitting I should base my next body of work on her daughters.

How does it connect or find a voice through your paintings?

The muses themselves function as modes of remembering through the many vehicles of storytelling, story, fact, feeling, joy, grief, movement, love, ritual, and cosmos. Each of these paintings gets its namesake from a specific muse and its chosen by me, based entirely on how I personally responded to the creation of the artwork and the energy I feel they project.

What does the concept of the ‘muse’ mean to you as an artist?

When I paint, I feel like I am bringing forth something that has already existed, it’s a form of remembering. Though the painting is brand new to this world, it is the sum of many moments that came before. To muse is to remember, to think deeply from the cosmic pool of all existing knowledge to birth a new incarnation, a different assembly of components collaged together from my perspective and unique lived experience. A muse is the door to a newborn perception. I make new worlds from my favourite parts of this one.

What does the term 'Magical Realism’ mean to you? Can you expand on that a bit further? 

Someone applied that description to my artwork as a genre and I kind of love it. I find the term beautifully poetic, but also quite fitting. My paintings are not of real existing documented gardens but function more like remembered environments, memory filtered dreamscapes. I feel like I paint much like I remember. Some parts are incredibly detailed, some dissolve into shadow, some parts abstract and float away. Some glow and are illuminated, some cast and descend into shade, and all of it is orchestration. 

Do you feel any kinship with artists of the exotic like Henri Rousseau?

This is a great question because my work is often compared to Rousseau, which at first really mystified me. As much as I like the work of Rousseau, until I was compared so often to him, I hadn’t really studied it deeply. Like Rousseau, I am a fan of green, all the greens. I mix my own greens, countless greens. Like Rousseau I build up a deliberate composition of a non-existent place. Unlike Rousseau my plants are based on real plants. Rosseau made many of his botanical structures up, which I kind of love and could potentially play around with sometime in the future when I feel I have satisfied my internal visual library with enough real species to draw from. I do feel I am drawn to the exotic, in that I myself am exotic to this land having migrated here as a child from northern England. In fact, some of the first things that really stood out to me on arrival was the botanical differences. Ponga trees looked like giant bracken, phoenix palms (which I called pineapple trees) had me in awe, Norfolk pines (which I likened to Lego trees) looked thoroughly unreal to me. The trees paired with the turquoise water and intense blue skies made me feel like I’d washed up on treasure island.

Do you think of yourself as being in conversation with the tradition of botanical painting/illustration?

I think so yes. It’s important to me that the plants I’m using are recognisable, and not necessarily in the realm of realism, but somewhere between an impression and realism, like a visual note. A recognisable idea. I’m always thrilled when agriculturalists and landscape designers comment positively on my selection of plantings and choices. I know many gardeners are drawn to my work because they recognise the botanical selections.  

 How do you think the concept of ‘nature’ operates in your work?

Nature is the muse. Nature is the controlled (garden) vs the chaotic (wilderness). There’s a tension that exists in my work because I so often pair the two together, but ultimately they are derived from the same thing, nature. Nature curated alongside nature untouched.  I live in the far north and my home is a small cabin, with vegetable and flower gardens surrounded by native bush. Each year I try and control my garden, each year nature throws something my way, a cyclone, relentless passion-vine hopper, katydids, drought, but the attempt to curate a small part of it is relentless. Sometimes I think my favourite times are late spring, when everything looks lush and under control, other times I think my favourite time is when autumn has taken hold, I’ve lost control, the seed heads are out, and the grasses are encroaching. I feel it’s these contradictions that crop up a lot of the time in my work too. The manicured, interrupted with a sneaky oxeye daisy or two, all taking place under the cathedral of the native canopy.

How does your biography find expression in the work?

I think the interplay between the native bush and the introduced species is a very telling visual expression of my lived experience. I think one of the reasons my gardens look so uniquely of New Zealand, rather than cottage gardens of the Cotswold for instance, is that obsession I have for the intense light and how it creates pools of shade. How I’m still drawn to the texture of trees and plants specifically for their competing textures and contradictory placing. I was a child when I migrated to this country and I distinctly remember thinking (quite often for the first several years I lived here) that I was in a dream and would wake up in my northern English bed. The dreamscape environments undeniably play into the magical thinking, magical realist I am.