ANDREA SHERRILL EVANS 

NEW GROWTH AT IA&A HILLYER, WASHINGTON DC 

EXHIBITION VISIT 

Andrea Sherrill Evans is a Baltimore based artist and educator. Her work is delicate and her process involves a great deal of care. She often uses natural materials as a way to ask bigger questions relating to how we engage with our surrounding environments. Natural inks, paper making, and other labor driven processes often propelled by nature are a cornerstone of her work. Recently, I spoke with Andrea about her recent exhibition, New Growth, at IA&A Hillyer in Washington D.C. For this body of work she sourced natural materials, plant life, seeds, and other organic materials  from the area surrounding the gallery for paper making, inks, and conceptual inspiration. Andrea has lived in a variety of landscapes across the United States, which has sharpened her awareness of the ways humans assert themselves onto nature and, more recently, what that looks like in urban environments. Andrea is faculty at Maryland Institute College of Art and has also taught workshops related to the usage of natural materials and processes. 

Interview between Amy Boone-McCreesh and Andrea Sherrill Evans, September 2024

Amy: Can you talk about the title, New Growth, and the work in the exhibition at Hillyer?  

Andrea:  ​​It was interesting–I came up with the title when I was proposing the show, so it was at a point where I didn’t actually know what the work was going to be. I knew what the process would be; my plan was to make a new body of work that would be in response to the neighborhood surrounding the gallery area. My proposal was to walk around the neighborhood and gather both imagery and physical materials–particularly plant-based materials that I would use to make inks and paper for the drawings. I was thinking about a title that could wrap up and encompass that project: thinking about cycles of growth and decay in the natural world, thinking about seasonal cycles, and also cycles within my own practice. So I felt like New Growth could kind of play back and forth with being a reflection of my own practice and where I’m at in it. Also, knowing that I was gonna be starting the work in January and moving into spring and summer, I was thinking about the growth that was literally happening in the area as well. 

The show is a series of drawings on handmade paper, all inks and charcoal that were made with plants gathered from the area surrounding the gallery. They all have kind of a reference or relationship to different moments and places in the surroundings. A lot of the imagery is pulled from what I see as sort of overlooked areas or places where the growth of the plant life is in relationship to the architectural and built structures in the neighborhood. The drawings scatter across the gallery space–I really see them as being in relationship to one another as opposed to emphasizing a single image. They’re all about a conversation between the different images. They vary in size from small and kind of more intimate, to medium size square drawings. I’m playing with installation in some recent bodies of work and I realized, looking back at some work that I made probably 10 years ago, that I had kind of been playing with that idea then too. That kind of scattering and arranging at different heights and distances–it’s coming back in. I sort of had forgotten that I had done that previously.

I hope that they might invite someone to move through this space and kind of take their time to really think about their physical relationship to the work, looking up and down, like a mirror of how you might walk through a neighborhood and make different observations and have your attention called to different places.

I’ve been interested in the relationship of the work to the space. It’s such an intimate space, it’s a long skinny gallery, not super high ceilings. So it did create this little world to work with in there. I was thinking a lot about how people might come in and walk to the right or they might come in and walk to the left and what would be those different experiences?  I was thinking also about the view that someone would have as they first walk into the gallery and the discovery they would have turning the corner. I did map out much of the layout for the walls in advance. I was lucky to borrow a friend’s studio space and use their large walls to start thinking about the relationships of things. There were still some decisions that were made in the gallery space itself, very much in response to the space.

And then another component of the work is the series of samples of inks and papers–they are on the wall on your right side when you walk into the gallery space. There’s a set of eight inks, and then some different paper samples that were all materials that were made, and that are part of, the other work in the show. I’ve been exploring different ways of sharing more of the process of the work in the hopes that people might have a better understanding of what’s gone into the drawings.

Amy: How was preparing for this exhibition different from previous work? What did you discover about the neighborhood or even the city  through your artistic process ?

Andrea: When I’ve done some similar projects in the past, I’ve had a different kind of access to the space. Last year,  I did a project On Summer’s Margin for Upstate Art Weekend and had permission from the owners of the property to really work with the space and gather materials there. At residencies, I’ve been able to gather materials with the guidance of people running them. I’ve also foraged plants around my neighborhood in Baltimore, places that I know well. It definitely took a while to feel I understood the neighborhood around IA&A at Hillyer a little bit better, before it felt more comfortable. The gallery is near Dupont Circle and the Embassy Row area. So it took some time to kind of figure out my comfort level with engaging with the space, both in terms of taking photographs and starting to gather materials, and also to kind of think about what my responsibility is to the place: who are all the different inhabitants, human and non-humans, and what are the relationships within all the plant life in this more urban setting. There were a lot of private yards and spaces, and a lot of areas under surveillance. And I’m not going to go into someone’s yard and cut their tulips or something, and I’m also always trying to be sensitive to other non-human creatures and the importance of different plants in their environment. So I found myself, at least in terms of gathering materials, really drawn to things that were either a kind of detritus on the sidewalk–like fallen branches or dogwood blossoms–or in abundance, like mulberries in May. And I also gathered plants that might be considered “weeds”. As a result it’s a very particular kind of picture, or very particular palette developed from the place, it’s not all-encompassing.  With the grass fiber that I incorporated into the paper,  Hakone grass, there were landscapers removing a bunch of grass that had died back over winter from a very manicured landscape area. I was walking by and I was like, “Can I have that?” as they were removing it. But that was just a total coincidence that ended up working out great, because it was incorporated into much of the paper for the show. Overall, it was kind of challenging to navigate because it was harder for me to feel like I was getting to know the place. I still kind of felt like an outsider to it. At the same time, it was really interesting to witness some of the different seasons and to observe how the landscape changed;  that really did come into the drawings.

Amy: Over what time span did you gather materials? How did that determine how you thought about the show? 

Andrea: I would say pretty much January through June. So there’s a lot of changes that happened. It started in winter and then went into spring and summer. So I found myself drawn, in terms of the imagery, to  things that were very manicured, like interesting shapes and hedges and bushes, but also things that were sort of wild–wild and growing between the cracks of things.  I think the preparation for it was coming up with a plan, but the thing that was challenging is that I didn’t really know what I was going to be making and I knew that I had this fairly short deadline. I found out about the show in late November 2023 that the show was going to be the following August . So I had this fairly compact timeline and whole body of work to create. There were times that it really made me very nervous–feeling very anxious about whether it would come together or not. But I knew the general process. I wanted to make paper for the show, so it was like, okay, the first thing to do is to start gathering some materials that could be brought into paper and inks. Then I started to make paper, started to make the different inks, and then the drawings. From there I kind of worked back and forth with this process, especially as the seasons changed and plants were at different points in their life cycle. But even when I started making the drawings, it took a while for me to understand–to see what their relationship would be to one another–and to really start to feel like I could begin to see what the show was going to be. And of course I couldn’t even start the drawings until the paper was made. I love that process of making paper and it was almost hard to want to start working on it because I was like, “Oh, it’s so beautiful just as it is.”

Amy: I feel like some of your past works are related to labor, through performance and objects, do you still think about this?

​​Andrea: Yes, a lot of that older work was about slow, repetitive, meditative kind of tasks.  I’m really fascinated, and I think it also is a bit of my personality, to be interested in those processes. As the labor has moved into a different place in the work, like away from just making the drawing part of the work, to making the paper, making the inks, gathering those materials. I think it’s given me some freedom to have the labor in the making of the drawings sit in a different way too. Some of these are a lot more abstract than previous work I’ve made, or a little bit looser. Some of them happened pretty quickly–or they were like, what I thought was going to be the first layer of something–ended up being the final piece. But I do have to remind myself, there’s all these layers of labor that are part of the process. And in my practice, labor is really deeply connected to care and tending, attention and time.

Amy: I know you have a garden, how does that, or does it relate at all to your studio practice? 

Andrea: I love processes of making things, creating things, and growing things. And I think in the garden, it has been a lesson to me and for my practice–the balance of what I have control over and what I don’t have control over. And sort of being a little bit hands off. In my gardening and working with plants, I am a little bit, I don’t know the right word, it could be lazy. I kind of like to kind of wait, sort of see what happens, and observe. This summer was so hot and a lot of the vegetable plants that I’ve been growing just haven’t been producing very well. And I felt like, oh, my garden’s a failure. But then I think about, well, I’ve been collecting all these flowers that I’ve been growing and they’ve been doing great. And so it’s also the framing that I use to evaluate success. 

Previously I was just interested in growing vegetables and now I’m kind of obsessed with growing flowers. I’ve been working on building more of a native pollinator garden as part of the gardens that we have. And I’m excited to have that beneficial part of the environment even in a space like this. There’s a slowness to gardening too, where it’s like I have to remind myself that there is no immediate result. The same goes for artmaking. And it’s been important for me to remember to meet some of the deadlines that need to happen in order for the future results. I planted all these seeds for native plants in little pots over the winter. And that didn’t take that long, it took a couple hours maybe. But if I hadn’t done that, I wouldn’t now have this whole set of plants that are ready to go out in the garden this fall and are gonna be really amazing in a couple years. In the studio too, even little things, consistent things, add up. 

I’m starting to grow flowers to use in my work, and it’s interesting to think about my relationship with plants I’m growing versus plants that I’m gathering, collecting. I’ve been trying to introduce some more dye plants into my garden: calendula and coreopsis, Hopi black dye sunflowers, some marigolds–which I used to kind of be like, “Eh, marigolds,” and now I now love them. They’ve got such a great smell.  I also plan to do some dyeing with them which is a whole other process.

Amy: You held a workshop at Hillyer during the run of the show and you also teach at MICA, what aspects of your process are transferable or what elements are you able to teach?

Andrea: I can kind of look at it both within the framework of natural ink making more specifically, but also teaching in a broader way too. So maybe starting with the more technical things, which I’ve been teaching through a class at MICA called Art in Process, and then doing some of these workshops–I did one at Fox Haven Farm this summer–and then at Hillyer during my show. When teaching and sharing these processes, I emphasize that these are processes that I have learned from many other artists who have been generous to share them. And that working with these methods allows us to be part of a much larger community: a lineage of artists engaging with these natural materials and working with traditional and historic processes. 

It’s been so amazing to see how people respond to those processes because I think there’s something about it that fills a desire that many people have to be connected to the world that we live in–to learn that we all have relationships to different plants, or to cooking, or to different creative processes. I think there’s something about the hands-on degree that, for some people, they really feel a connection to it. And then I think it also opens up these unexpected kinds of experimental processes too, where discovery and accident and experimentation are really deeply embedded. It’s something that I hope for people who are interested, it’s something that they can then take away and bring into their practice if they want. And then I’ve learned a ton through teaching and working with these processes with students, because my students would be like, “Can you make an ink with this?” And I’ll be like, “I’ve never done it, I would guess that we maybe could based on this other ink I’ve made with a similar material…but what happens if you do this?“ I had a group of students who were like, “We’re really gonna try to figure out how to mix a green” with natural inks and they were doing all this experimentation. It also contributed to my practice because when I first started with the inks, I wasn’t really doing a lot of modifying by shifting the pH or adding iron, and I feel like it’s really expanded. So there’s that aspect. And then it’s just also really a delight to get to share something I love with other people and to have them be excited about it too. ​​

I think about teaching and working with other artists in a bigger way, sort of zooming out, I guess, and I feel like there’s a responsibility to also be deeply invested in my practice if I’m going to come in as a teacher in this space. And there’s so much about seeing other artists’ challenges and accomplishments and discoveries that is really inspiring for my own practice. There’s so much that I talk to my students about, then when I’m in my studio, if I’m having a hard time, if I’m freaking out, unsure of what I’m doing, I think, “What would you tell your students?” And I’ll try to give my advice back to myself. I’m not aiming for perfection, and whatever it ends up being, it’s going to be something that I’ll learn from.

Amy: Did you learn or discover anything about your own work or where you may go next during the planning, or duration of this exhibition at Hillyer?

Andrea: I really want to continue on this path and process of working with specific places, using my practice as a way to learn about them and to connect to people. One thing that I would like to do more in the future is to find ways of engaging more deeply with other people in the process. Early on for this show, I did reach out to a couple institutions and organizations in the area about the possibility of gathering plants there, and didn’t get any positive response for that. So I just kind of moved forward and was working in a more individualized way. What I really hope for a future project would be to work in greater collaboration with a site, I’d love to work with a historical site or to be able to work with people that know the history or the plant life or the ecology of the area in greater detail, so that it’s not just my own lens and experience. So that it could just be a bit of a tighter relationship in conversation and collaboration with others, and more expansive.