Rafael Pérez Evans
Rafael Pérez Evans is an artist-researcher whose work brings contemporary art into dialogue with critical disability studies, Mad studies and the ecological humanities.
His practice-led DPhil in Fine Art is titled Against Care, Towards a Crip Breakdown Materialism. The thesis traces how state-induced fear and systemic pressure settle into bodies, communities and lands, and how that accumulation erupts into physical form. Working from a materialist position, Pérez Evans approaches breakdown as a lived condition, a political fracture and a site of liberation.
The work unfolds through large-scale installation, participatory sound and Mad archival methods. Repurposing tired readymades from agricultural and industrial origins, organic matter and gestures drawn from protest, he turns pressure into sculpture, asking what urgent forms of togetherness can be made by bodies and lands pushed beyond value and repair.
In the written component of the research, Pérez Evans treats the doctoral thesis as a physical and institutional site for dumping. Writing becomes a material method for discharging the fear, exhaustion and dependency produced by the breakdown of care under neoliberal capitalism, from family and friendship to medicine and the state. Through sick logorrhoea and polyvocality, the thesis refuses the demand that distress be made orderly, fluent and sane.
His doctoral research is supervised by Professor Oreet Ashery and Dr Lee Trimming, and supported by an AHRC Open-Oxford-Cambridge Studentship and a Queen's College Scholarship.
Recent exhibitions include Brown Notes at Mostyn, Wales; Horizontals at Wakehurst, Kew Gardens; Upgrade: Orchids for Potatoes at CAAC Museum, Seville; Lull at Workplace, London; Dust Bathers at Queer Circle, London; Unpacking, Wheels at the Royal Academy of Arts and South London Gallery; Handful at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds; and The Devil’s Bird – Ornithomancy at MOCA Taipei.
Pérez Evans was awarded a Sculpture Fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute in collaboration with Leeds Beckett University. Alongside his practice, he teaches at UK art schools. Recent artist talks include the University of Oxford, Goldsmiths MFA, the Architectural Association and the University of Virginia.
