CRYPT RESIDENCY: EDIE EVANS

9-13 July 2025

During my residency at The Crypt Gallery, I will develop a new body of work under the working title Material Time – a sensory, process-led exploration of presence, temporality, and embodied experience. This project continues my research in how neurodivergent experiences of time and place, often cyclical, sensory, and nonlinear, can inform new ways of working and seeing.

The crypt offers a rare opportunity to reflect these ideas within a space that itself embodies multiple temporalities: human, architectural, and geological. Drawing on the crypt’s layered history and charged atmosphere, the work will unfold slowly, shaped by touch, rhythm, and the passage of time. The site’s unique context, once a burial place, now a space for reflection, transition, and transformation, will inform how I approach the making. I am interested in how the crypt holds time within its walls: not just linear, historical time, but deep time – felt, sedimented, and lived. It invites slowness and attentiveness, asking us to move differently, breathe differently, listen. As a neurodivergent, disabled artist, my practice is grounded in physical processes that evolve gradually and intuitively.

I work with repetition and care: folding, stitching, wrapping – gestures that act as a kind of thinking through the body. These movements are sensory, grounding, and meditative, and in a space like the crypt, they take on new resonance. My work engages with time not just as a concept but as something tactile: something that lingers in fabric, in light, in the weight of air. Throughout the residency I will work with hand-dyed textiles, materials that hold intimate forms of memory and time. These pieces may be draped, suspended, or gathered into sculptural arrangements, shaped by the crypt’s atmosphere: the coldness of the stone, the weight of humidity, the shifting light patterns over the course of the day. I am drawn to the way fabric can collapse and unfold, echoing the space’s own layered histories and the soft accumulation of time within it.

Moving image and still photography will also play a key role in the work. Rather than conventional projections, these will act as subtle illuminations, fragments of motion, shadow, and surface that interact with the textiles and walls. Light becomes both medium and subject, echoing the sensory richness of the space while allowing moments of quiet distortion and softness. The visual material may include close documentation of making, gentle movements, or fleeting glimpses of the natural world, each contributing to a visual language grounded in texture and presence.

Email : edie.evans@gmail.com

Website : www.edie-evans.com

IG : edie__evans