Gwen Evans’s body of work looks like a creative extension of her inner world, which seems to carefully merge calm and luminous depictions fused by simplicity and emotional charge. Her artistic practice keeps her at the borderline of the familiar and the uncanny; converting ordinary domestic settings into metaphors of various emotional states. Whether showing a person hanging his laundry at dusk, or a ghostlike figure of a shadow behind the patterned cloth, Evans depicts compositions where the characters’ subtle gestures contradictorily convey a very powerful potency.
An evocative atmosphere operates as one of the defining aspects of the painter’s work. The viewer is able to observe scenes that are caught in a soft, velvety light while the backgrounds, that are often made up of deep blues or green and violet gradients, have a sort of dusk atmosphere suggesting the suspended time of an early evening. The sense of a cultivated atmosphere functions not only as a significant emotional guideline which shapes her figures’ behaviour but also how they relate to both the surrounding space and one another.
words: yannis kostarias
Evans’s creative technique deals with the perception of stillness, which evokes a sense of silence for the viewer. The artist carries out her work in a quite gentle manner, keeping away from harsh outlines in the compositions or other uncontrolled tonal variations that might disrupt her aesthetic configurations on her canvases. The artist’s work carries the most delicate and precise features: the hair looks smooth as silk, the clothes emit a matte warmth, bringing some tender lightness to the shadows in her work. Even when the final painting result is enriched by complex elements such as patterned fabrics, detailed clothing, or other symbolic objects, the artist manages to maintain a certain mood of tranquility and coherence on her pictorial space.
Colour selection signifies an important role in Evans’s emotional outcome. She usually works with subdued colours built around cool, atmospheric blues that go well with earthy ochres, moss greens, and softened reds. The colours used by the artist do not clash each other but smoothly communicate with subtle fluidity, thus creating both a harmonic and emotional unity. For instance, the pale green colour of the hand, the warm brown colour of the coat, or the delicate pink colour that features in a quilt- each hue successfully leads to carefully balanced chromatic choices and compositions. The blues that Evans uses, on many occasions, are not only serving as the background space but also as the psychological background of the work: a color of dusk, transition, and introspection.
Repeated themes are quietly suggestive in the works of Evans and therefore they form a soft symbolic vocabulary. Quilts, patterned fabrics, laundry hanging, baskets, small domestic objects – these are motifs that constantly come up in her works one after another. Also, these objects often feel like characters, becoming companions of the figures or shaping the narrative space and building the emotional architecture of each work. More than anything else, her approach that she takes on the human figure is quite distinctive; Evans’s protagonists are converted into vessels of the atmosphere. Facial features are softened with expressions suspended, and their gestures are often understated- such as a hand reaching, a body pausing, or a figure standing behind cloth- which carry the emotional weight of the scene.
To a great extent, Evans composes pieces that are akin to softly-spoken narratives-stories told through light, texture, and gesture instead of being told through symbols that are explicitly presented. Her art practice is a poetic rendition of the everyday, and this is what imbues the ordinary and daily life in her work, with a notable depth of human experience. Stillness in the artist’s body of work states an expressive dimension, while at the same time revealing itself as a striking and meditative force.
Gwen Evans – The Space Between at Monti8 gallery in Rome – 4th December 2025 – 24th January 2026
You tend to use colors that are vibrant and eye-catching, like strong fields of green, crimson, teal, and earthen tones in your work — can you explain how you decide on a dominant color in a work and what kind of mood you want to evoke by this color?
Most often I use a palette of red, green, and blue, which is inspired by the colour compositions found in early Renaissance paintings. I choose one of these hues to dominate — most often a blue or green. Flooding a painting with a single colour can bring a real intensity to the work, while cooler tones introduce a more subdued feeling. I enjoy working with the tension that arises when those two moods meet. Sometimes I’ll add a warm colour to a complementary colour contrast, like an orange placed next to a blue.
I typically begin with a verdaccio or grisaille underpainting, gradually glazing layers of colour over the top. This process gives the figures a greenish, almost sickly hue, which also connects to ideas surrounding the uncanny valley — a term coined in the 1970s that relates closely to Freud’s theories of death and the uncanny. He suggests that an eerie feeling can arise when we start to question whether something inanimate might actually be alive — like a doll or a wax figure. I think the unnatural pallor of the skin and the depersonalised quality of my figures evoke a similar response, especially in my depictions of hands, where the absence of fingernails makes them appear quite doll-like.
The characters in your work look halfway between worlds — they feel recognisably human, yet slightly displaced. There’s a sense of the familiar, like a portrait or a house, but the figures are too big or small with an ambiguous sense of time. How do you juggle these elements to create everyday narratives that carry a kind of unnerving tension?
I try to balance familiar elements – domestic spaces, everyday rituals or homespun textiles – with aspects that carry a more unsettling edge. You can see this in the spaces the figures inhabit, which are transitional or liminal. And liminal spaces, by their nature, often drift into the uncanny.Physically, they can appear in the form of places that feel slightly off – endless corridors or familiar locations made strange, like an empty supermarket. Psychologically, they stir feelings of uncertainty, and I think that’s central to what makes something unnerving. In my work, the figures occupy domestic spaces that seem familiar at first glance but are stripped of context or detail.
The depersonalised figures and faceless presences also add an uneasy undercurrent, which is heightened by the theme of surveillance running throughout the work. Afigure spiesthrough frosted glass in ‘Threshold’, and in ‘Housework’ another turns back mid-task, as if sensing an unseen presence. By positioning these figures as waiting, watching, and being watched I want to infuse seemingly everyday scenes or tasks with a lingering sense of dread, as if something or someone unseen is just beyond the frame.
You prefer an indifferent or masked expression when it comes to depicting facial features.What does this emotional detachment bring to the viewers experience of interacting with your work?
I think it makes the narrative harder to read, and the characters intentions towards one another more difficult to decipher. I like this ambiguity as I want the viewer to be unsure if the paintings capture a moment of quiet repose or the prelude to something more sinister.
To me this emotional detachment also creates a sense of malaise, as though the characters are uneasy inhabitants of their own home, or perhaps reluctantly going through the motions of domestic life.
Your use of motifs hands pressing on walls, curtains framing bodies, walls and partitions between figuresare evident in different works. What attracts you to these motifs and what is the symbolism behind them.
Boundaries are a theme that recurs throughout the work, like you mention, in the form of walls, quilts or curtains and household objects like vases and tables.These elements both separate and seclude figures, suggesting barriers to communication and a sense of underlying anxiety.
Many of the figures are in a kind of in-between, situated in thresholds, windows or doorways. I like how this could be seen to echo the figuresown uncertainty, suggesting an unsettled state of mind where things don’t feel entirely stable.
Your works often feel as though they’re set inside a house or a person’s private space, yet the time and place remain deliberately unclear. What does this sense of timelessness mean to you in relation to character and place?
I think it feeds into the unnerving or uncanny quality in the work, almost giving the impression that the figures and spaces are unanchored. I like that itleaves the work more open for the viewer to fill in what’s left unsaid or omitted.
Perhaps that sense of timelessness comes from the paired down nature of the spaces where they lack any significant details or markers of time. But it could also be the result of the way I combine references.Some aspects of the figure draw on early renaissance painting, whilst other details like the hair in ‘Housework’ is inspired by the baroque painting ‘The Penitent Magdalen’ by Georges de La Tour. The composition of the bathroom is based on my own home, but the stylisation, especially the doubling of the figure in the mirror, was partly influenced by the film ‘The Shining’. Other elements are completely imagined, like the tulips in ‘Checkpoint’, whereas the traditional quilt in ‘Visitor’ is drawn from upbringing in Wales and is made by a family member. Blending these references from different periods in painting with contemporary popular culture, alongside imagined elements and details drawn from my own homecreates a space that feels familiar but not tied to any specific moment.
Could you tell us more about your new exhibition in Monti8 gallery in Rome? What kind of painting are you going to present there?
I’ll be showing a series of paintings and drawings that feature anonymised figures that seem to disturb the stillness of domestic life. Faces are hidden with identities stripped and ambiguous scenes make the characters hard to read. I hope that this sense of uncertainty will leave the viewers wondering whether something sinister is about to unfold.
In this new body of work, I’ve been interested in how everyday rituals and familiar environments can slip into the uncanny. Freud describes the uncanny as “a class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar,” and I think the home and the rituals we perform within itoffers fertile ground for that feeling to emerge. Even the smallest shift from the ordinary can make something feel off.
Many of the paintings include quilts, tablecloths, and other domestic textiles, which seem tosuggest warmth andcomfort but they serve as a counterpoint to the uncanny presences that inhabit these liminal spaces.
Across the paintings, windows, doorways, and curtains act as recurring thresholds, suggesting that the figures occupy an in-between space and amplifying the sense of uncertainty. These liminal spaces seem to extend past the painting itself, with the canvas edges doubling as the frames of windows or doorways. In some pieces, the figures engage with someone outside the scene entirely, drawing the viewer into the moment as an active participant—or even a voyeur.
All images courtesy of the artist