My work engages with discarded materials — primarily the side of a lorry — objects that have travelled great distances, weathered time, and absorbed the traces of past journeys. Now stilled, yet rich with material histories waiting to be unearthed and reimagined, these materials become vessels of attachment and transformation. Through exhibitions containing site-specific, in-situ installations, I use materials found by seeking out the overlooked and the abandoned — remnants that carry emotional and historical weight.
The most recent example being, a work made from the scaffold cladding from the fire ruined Mackintosh building in Glasgow.
If awarded the Dover Prize, I will use the bursary to develop a new body of work that scavenges directly from Darlington’s industrial past — particularly its railway manufacturing legacy. Rather than transporting materials from elsewhere, I intend to walk, search, and dig through the spaces and remnants of Darlington itself: scrapyards, disused sites, workshops — to find materials with specific historical or emotional charge connected to the town’s identity.
From these found materials, I will construct a large-scale sculptural work and an accompanying video piece. The video will document the search process as a performative act of longing and obsession — tracing my raw relationship with Darlington’s industrial remnants. The sculptural work will reflect the physicality of the site and its histories, reinterpreting what’s found into a staged environment of fragmentation, tension, and theatricality.
The bursary would support the purchase of appropriate materials (alongside found), travel, accommodation and living, local research and permissions, alongside video production costs. Ideally I would spend eight weeks within the town, researching, scavenging, exploring and making.
This project signals a turning point in my practice — a movement outward, from the solitary pull of material obsession into a lived dialogue within place. My framework of attachment, desire, and detritus will find new rhythm through the materials and memories embedded in this town. The Dover Prize offers not just support, but permission — to dig, to listen, to unearth what remains. It would allow me to create work that is both materially ambitious and emotionally rooted — blending research, performance, and sculpture into something tactile, communal, and alive.
This project will root itself in Darlington — not as a site to be spoken at, but as a place to be listened to. By scavenging from the remnants of its railway industry, I hope to let the town shape the work as much as I shape the materials. In walking its edges, handling its cast-offs, and tracing the emotional charge of what has been left behind, the work becomes not an imposition, but a quiet conversation with the town’s past.
The sculptural installation and accompanying video will be built from Darlington’s own industrial debris — steel, rust, soot, the residue of movement — reimagined into something so strange. In doing so, the work honours what still lingers: the rhythm of manufacture, the weight of what was built, and the silence that follows.
As a young, experimental contemporary artist, I approach material not only as substance but as memory — reframing what’s been discarded into something intimate, performative, and affecting. Rather than bringing in a practice from elsewhere, this project lets Darlington become the practice — materially and emotionally. I hope it will resonate with those who know these places, even if only in passing, offering a subtle re-seeing of what surrounds us, and what we choose — or forget — to remember.
Lilian Evans’ transdisciplinary practice is characterised by her sensual exploration into the expanded field of painting, confronting the medium which she finds herself monotonously committed to. Through the physical manipulation of waste materials, she constructs large-scale draped formations which interrogate and penetrate the medium. Revolving around her methodology of desire, Evans’ practice sits in the space between wanting and possessing as she seeks to express her obsessive desire for the side of a lorry. Her works, constructed with intuition, compulsion, and lust, are in essence, desire made manifest. Key exhibitions include: a place in my heart (solo exhibition at The Pipe Factory, Glasgow 2024), The lover (solo exhibition at Beacon Arts Centre, Greenock 2025), and I DARE YOU TO LOVE ME (solo exhibition at Strange Field, Glasgow 2025)
I have a Batchelor of Fine Art from Loughborough University, alongside a Master of Fine Art from the Glasgow School of Art.
I am yet to receive any professional grants or awards.
I organise an exhibition series in Glasgow, which aims to bring together Artists of varying stages of career, unified by a chosen theme – most recently Midnight.
I also chair a society, re:PRESENT, which aims at running artists talks, in-conversations and nights, bringing together the wider Glasgow community to discuss and learn about peoples practices.
Yes, most recently ArtMag, regarding my solo show at Beacon Arts Centre.
Email: lily_evans0187@hotmail.com
Address: 8/7 Fleming house, 134 Renfrew Street, Glasgow, Lanarkshire, G3 6ST, GB
Local Authority: Glasgow City Council
