Evette Sunset
Works featured in Solastalgia: an antidote at Fabrik Arts and Heritage, Lobethal 2020
Eye of the Storm
onsite suspended sculpture installation 2020
Eucalyptus branchlets, tree resin, ash, sprouts, redgum sawdust
“At the eye of the storm which disperses my known world into chaos, through wind/ fire/ flood, there is a moment of calm as it passes above me. I hold centre for that brief space of strength, out of which shock and loss are slowly transformed over time into a future of new ways to be.”
Evette Sunset
Village (2020)
Coppiced Hazelnut and Osier Willow, paper, leaves 2020
“In the New Hebrides islands, fishermen slept under their leather covered Coracles, turning them over as fishing vessels at sunrise. Similarly, with kindly intimacy and protection, a village provides shelter and food for tomorrow’s journey of dreams.
Deb, Chris, Hilary and Nat worked with me to harvest materials and construct the Coracles. A circle of upright Hazel stakes was pushed into the ground, twined at the base with willow; then bent over and random woven to create a domed form, which was lifted free on completion.” Evette Sunset
South Coast Regional Art Centre, Goolwa 2018
Forest Scroll I
clay moulded paper, wattle resin, graphite tree rubbing, wire bound with Monsteriosa sheaths 2017
“Scientific research now confirms that forests exist as complex social organisms, connected by a network of roots sharing nourishment and communicating via a mesh of fungus in the soil. The graphite rubbing is my root-like archaeological record of "borer city" activity, made on a huge lone Red Gum log, possibly 400 years old. Vulnerable remnant trees are like refugees-rootless, their community and culture torn away.
A scroll is itself a book of sorts: knowledge rolled up and stored. Like the concentric rings of tree trunks, scrolls have their roots in actual recorded events that we have had a hand in. What will the great grandchildren know?”
Evette Sunset
Image: Jo Wilmot
365 Days of String
suspended hand made strings made from plant materials 2017 - 2018
“Each string is unique. A visual poem, a textural compendium. A page of knowledge gleaned from time spent steeped in the heart of attention to nature. A leaf from the book of continuity, threaded back to ages when the fields, ditches, forests and wildlands were filled with useful and beautiful plants, whose names and properties people knew, as they wove them into their daily lives.
This unedited collection came together over six years. The original intention of a diary- one string per day, made from the materials to hand wherever I happened to be- lasted for only 59 consecutive days. Then gaps due to sickness, work, travel, fatigue or forgetting intervened. But the idea persisted, and has become a testament to the complex, fragmented and far flung nature of each person’s life in these times. The full year of string is even now still not complete!”
Evette Sunset
Image: Jo Wilmot
For more information on Evette’s work, visit: https://www.evettesunsetsculptor.com/