Luke Evans

0:04[Applause]

0:12not go away literally pissing my pants right now so glad this lectern is in front of me so you can't see so many Kevin's and I'm like sort of a photographer. And I say that because most the work that I make is either not using a camera or is perhaps more sculpture based and the camera is just there to bring it to life so tonight I'm going to just speed you through some of my work.

0:35And then into something really important that totally changed my life and finally onto something I'm working on right now.

0:40So the first one's inside out so my friend and Josh and I did this project back at Kingston when we were saying graphics and we had this idea that we would do this internal self-portrait perhaps by eating something that could take a picture of our insides and naturally as photographers the way to do this was with film so our idea was that film is made up of gelatin and suspended silver crystals and perhaps by eating the film the gelatin will be dissolved and even impression of our insides so we kind of research the dangers of doing something like this and surprisingly it's got nothing to do with the chemical makeup of film it's to do with the shape and their size and how sharp film is so the way we've got around it was we cut a single slide of 35 millimeter film cut the corners off then rolled it up and put it inside a plastic band so that would stop it from like opening up and lacerating our insides so just before I was about to do this I thought it would be good idea to bring my mom I'm bearing in mind she's a nurse and so I thought about the project Anna there was just this silence for what seemed like forever.

1:51And I just had to know what has this got to do with the graphic design I mean she had a point but we did it.

1:57Anyway which leads me onto the question that we always get asked about this project which is how did you get in there's no way to sugarcoat over this what we had to do was every time we needed the loo we had to poo in a bag and wear like rubber gloves and just feel through it.

2:24Now I've got IBS so I'm pretty much just flew out but josh is for some reason took like three long days but we got them back.

2:36And we couldn't believe what they look like they were still intact they had bubbles all over the surface they were a little bit broken and because this project became more about using film in a sort of non-traditional sense we ended up turning these into images with an electron microscope I mean not this one I have no idea who this guy is it just goes for giggles and here they are it's like the chamber and these are what we got now they're actually quite close to the whole frame of the film they look really zoomed in but no no it's just some of the details you still the layers have been like eaten away. And I call this twisting and here they are printed and there's Josh so something really weird happened with this project which is within 24 hours of putting this online this happened to first year students at Kingston University decided to record how the insides of their bodies also materials by eating 35 millimeter film and letting their internal organs do the rest so that was really really was I I really never thought my soul will be that famous.

3:46But we did find that the exposure can work in two ways somehow this image got its way online it's just this like internal mock-up that we used to explain the project to our tutors and we got this email hi Luke really cool installation inside out is this your chest x-ray you've got a foreign body I presume a piece of film the lower left lobe of your lung this potentially is not good news are you coughing thanks please let me know Alan the radiologist in Chicago thanks Alan I'm okay.

4:15So zero is probably the most dangerous project I've ever worked on. And it started with this idea that I would use electricity to make images with turns out I'm just good at finding ways to endanger myself so I started looking at the ways the electricity could leave marks or how it could potentially alter materials and that's when I came across this amazing old ad by Xerox where they explained the process of photocopying which is where you use electricity film light toner powder and a paper to transfer the image across so thought this is amazing this is what like the firt copiers downstairs are doing they print with electricity so I thought maybe if I use this process reverse engineering I might be able to show what a static electrical field looks like and that's what I spent the next 12 months doing building like really shitty bootleg Van de Graaff generators of copper Burk hands and like batteries this is Christmas Eve at my mom's house but eventually after enough tying around I had a working process so what happens is a place on electrode on a piece of plastic and then zap it with a piece of with one of the vandegraaff generators and then dust it with toner powder and the image just like shows up.

5:23So then I place a piece of paper on top heat sealed it which is why the ink is like so warm when it comes out of a fir copier and I got these they're kind of hard to see on the projector because they're like light tones are quite difficult to see and it turns out that the kind of shapes of the made on the inside can be determined by the weather of all things like when it was really humid I just couldn't get an image I made loads of these and edited them just like any other photograph and not that this should be like running theme in my work.

6:00But I showed my brother. And this is what he thought thanks Joel and there also a book designed by commissioned studio you were here tonight so if you want one just I'd like get them up.

6:14So I thought at this point I'm calling myself a photographer I should probably use a camera at some point so this is fortune it. Actually began because I used to bake as a form of stress relief sorry I just had to show this horrific hanging flowers in my mom's house I was building like pizza dough or something.

6:35And I thought that the the flower looked like a rocky landscape or something. And so I whipped off the table and grabbed like a really shitty lighting camera and I got this again the projection quality is not great I did not take this on my phone I just do a camera I couldn't believe the depth that you can get in something so small. And I made a whole series of these so this one's just a rock and like some salt and shaving film I can feel my agent in the audience being like please don't tell people how you work.

7:03This is so gross and this project became a really good exercise in making something from nothing this one's a piece of paper a really really really terrible table and here they are printed again so at this point I was making work a lot I was really on that treadmill like banging out work.

7:28This is my shockwave so this is what explosive energy looks like where.

7:31I worked with this XM OD munitions expert we're gonna watch this video back and see like a red dot on my head but by telling you math and the lens have to make like a homemade bomb and put it inside some clay and then detonate it.

7:49And then I cast the cavity that was left inside and which results in those black sculptors and this is a personal favorite this is called after burn this one like what quite difficult to see on the images but these kind of like abstract almost like charcoal drawings are actually the flaws of dance studios so the dancers have like left a big burning mark in the floor and left a man before the performances this one's I think nine meters long this was all going great and I was making work all the time then something happened to put a stop to all of this in 2015 I was working on the zero project for an exhibition at Somerset House and it was really late at the studio I got back. And I was taking shower and I was washing and I noticed something I found a lump on my right testicle my heart just sunk I couldn't sleep I just instantly assumed the worst so we could doctor's visits go by and I'm finding myself waiting for the scan results the following morning and at this point I'm working on the exhibition so hard to take my mind off of everything.

8:59That's going on I'm working on the biggest electrical print I've ever made and I don't know where this storm comes and my studio at the time is like a barn with like gaps where Windows used to be and so you can imagine what happened the wind blew through it ripped off all the tests that I had on the wall the print I was working on for weeks and weeks lifted up a tour and fell on the floor everything was just so and I just I just it just broke I left the studio and I I drove out to the middle of nowhere. And I lay on the floor and my teeth from the tarmac and I just screamed well to be honest I can't really remember what happened in that moment but what I do remember is that my phone has managed to like grasp on to the last bit of signal and there on that screen but my friends and family rebuilding everything at the studio up until that point I put so much pressure myself to be perfect having help was a sign of weakness but in that moment everything had changed and I've never been more grateful for anything in my life it gets better the next day I was diagnosed with testicular cancer but luckily enough for me my paranoia and anxiety had paid off this time I found it a really early stage within 24 hours I had my right testicle removed and the margins came back normal my treatment would be 10 years of regular observation saving chemotherapy for a rainy day I'm currently on my fourth year but after that whole experience to tell you the truth I didn't care about photography I don't care at all it just seems so irrelevant what had happened is that I was experiencing this form of burnout that had come because I had to stop and think about what I was doing I had to stop to pay attention to myself now I wish I could stand up here and say I have some like a magical formula for all of this.

11:07But the reality is it's taken me years of professional and self-help and all the time watching the most incredible work come in day after day after day and dealing with the guilt knowing that I'm taking time out for myself and worse yet the fear of being forgotten but to stand here and know that that time with worth it and to know that you won't be forgotten as long as you don't give up and just take that time to be selfish it's the most liberating feeling I did they find one thing that got me through all of this and that was archery of all things.

11:44And it was the perfect balance of like mental stillness and reflection and most importantly the ability to win things and within 12 months I was scouted by the Team GB codes and began training a hell of a lot and over that time archery taught me how to be confident again so last year I picked up my camera one more time and decided to continue where I left off. And this is second nature and it's something I'm working on right.

12:12Now I never felt finished with the landscape work before and forge so I had to kind of bend the feeling that I was repeating myself and just give myself the time to explore so this one's called glacier and I shot it over the winter that's just gone and of course I showed my mom and even so long as it's the last one she was just like where's that where did you go on holiday when did you go and then I showed her this and she was like I was like yes finally I haven't she truly lost it I'd always wanted to work with ice and I could never really afford a freezer big enough until that last year but something kind of have funny happened with this one which is with the color so I dyed the water and as it was freezing that kind of particles kept moving closer and closer together which resulted in that gradient it's totally planned one of the inspirations for this was this brilliant book called America's Wonderland I was flicking through it I found this it stopped me I was like what what the hell is this it turns out it's called the fire fall and what happened is in Yosemite the owner of the hotel above this peak would burn fires for the gas and then put it out by kicking it over the hill to make this waterfall of fire so thought this is incredible like this is amazing funnily enough it got bad it got banned because of wild fires but I thought I have to do this myself I have to do this again it's gonna be awesome I want that like fiery energy it's gonna be awesome.

13:38So I had this big plan to like take a ton of burning embers and like take them to a quarry with water below and get away with all. There was a problem and I think we're all guilty of this which is when you convince yourself so much that something's going to work that you stop thinking like a human being because wild fires started breaking out and actually not far from me on the Malvern Hills a single barbeque had like lit fire to the hole if the top of the hills was like okay hopefully you shouldn't be doing this.

14:10So I thought something else now living a farm and that comes with these benefits and I somehow convinced the owner of the farm to lift up like a ton of burning embers and actually make them fall from a height this is them falling after about the tenth attempt had turns out I've really at making fires and this is what I got again it's quite hard to see like the subtle tones but I just love that like fiery energy I got it from it. And this one's like a personal favorite again this one's really difficult to see on that I do apologize for the projection I did not take this on the phone because if you look closer with this one they kind of look like birds they're actually birch seeds so I spent weeks and weeks and weeks finding the most like the like seeds out of this birch tree and then really precariously balanced my life of my camera like over the edge of this.

15:08And this last one I'm going to show you felt like a really full circle moment for me it's because they are deer for this one started with archery I believe I've managed to get this into the presentation if you're having a really day like that's what your target face looks like but if you hold it up to the light it kind of look like dappled sunlight so I thought well what if I did this with a picture what if I destroyed a picture and then lit it from the back. And we photographed it so use this like seventies old like edge glass star filter on the back to kind of exaggerate the sunlight which resulted in now I feel so nice I feel so nice thank you girl and it's a detail about to South second a choice of really really really short snippet the project it's nice at post an article about it today. And I'm like over the moon Thank You Lucy so much and just before I close I just I just wanted to say like how important this moment has been for me because I wish I could have seen this one I thought I was just gonna disappear and I never want to make work again so I'm just really hoping that if anyone is going through like a really time to just take it from like this failed scientist with half a bollock and a camera to just not give up and be a little bit selfish thank you [Applause]