Rita Evans - Performance Schematic

In Residency: Sept 28th-29th

Work-in-Progress Open View: Sept 29th / 1 – 2pm

Performance: Sept 30th / 7:30 – 8:30pm (doors 7pm)

OVADA, OX1 1NJ 

Pay What You Decide, on the door, no advance tickets

For this audiograft residency and performance at OVADA, Rita Evans will bring her unique body of sculptural objects to work alongside Anna Jane Houghton, Sharon Phelan, Catherine Ross, and Beth Shearsby. 

Within the acoustics and history of the OVADA warehouse (which evokes a patchwork of diverse textures and patterns) this new group will explore the idea of using sculptures as tools to understand and interact with space, seeking to blur individual boundaries by bringing themselves into a mode of both active and collective inquiry.

The artists will spend two days in residency before the performance, experimenting with vibrating strings; piercing through wavering surfaces; threading reel to reel tape through resistant forms; creating and arranging playable sculptures to ‘measure’, listen to, and interact with the space; and layering pre-recorded sounds with the objects to create and sustain a dynamic interplay in between acoustic bodies.

Rita Evans

Rita Evans (1980) is a British-Canadian artist based in London. Her works have been exhibited and commissioned internationally, including The Drawing Room, Camden Arts Centre, Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada and Archway Sound Symposium at Five Years Gallery, London. In 2020 Rita was selected for Towner International Biennial and was artist-in-Residence for her commission Theatre of Sound. In 2021, Rita was artist-in-residence at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in Germany, where her exhibition Instrument was on show at Gropius House, as part of Fictional curated by Florian Strob. In 2022, her Tate St Ives Commission, Stringing the Matrix, was exhibited and performed. Rita also presented seven new sonic-sculptures at Towner Eastbourne in a performance commission supported by The Foundation Foundation Emerging Artist Award. Major awards include the Stephen Cripps’ Studio Award, an Acme Residency & Awards Programme with The Royal Opera House, Henry Moore Foundation, and Stephen Cripps’ family.

Anna Jane Houghton

Anna Jane Houghton is a practice-led PhD researcher and artist working with sound and print media. Her work investigates the lexicon of sonorous objects and prepared listening spheres in the realm of contemporary artistic and curatorial practice.

Her work aims to challenge the conventions of sonic artwork in the context of the poetics of materials, the fabric of memory and the sensitivity of space.

Sharon Phelan

Sharon Phelan is a Dublin-based artist whose work spans performance, installation, writing and composition.

With specific attention to sound and voice, her practice researches resonance and poetics of place, often drawing on past sites of radical potential while speculating upon the relationship between myth and history.

Catherine Ross

Catherine Ross is an artist working in multiple media. Auto-ethnography, educational pedagogy, psychogeography, and phenomenology inspire her practice. Midway through a Fine Art PhD she is exploring if the boundary between art and liminality can alter perception. In digital photography, printmaking, social media, sound, and walking Catherine is investigating liminal, transformative threshold states/places, marginalisation, and ambiguity.