Gareth Evans
Total Breakthrough Fund support: £300,000
The Breakthrough grant to curator and writer Gareth Evans supported him to work with collaborator Di Robson and the company Artevents which Di created and which Gareth joined as co-director in 2005. Together, with Breakthrough Fund support, they conceived and produced The Re-Enchantment, a national arts project which came to fruition in 2011 exploring our relationship to place through four major artists’ commissions. The Breakthrough Fund provided core support for Gareth and Di to commit themselves to this ambitious project for three years, and contributed towards one of the four commissions.
The commissioned projects were: Patience (after Sebald), a film essay directed by Grant Gee about the hugely influential late writer WG Sebald, the East Anglian landscape, history and memory; Fissure, a three day walking performance in the Yorkshire Dales, exploring loss, grief and renewal, created by Louise Ann Wilson; England Revisited, Simon English’s national conceptual land artwork, using 75 map co-ordinates to write ‘England’ across the country; and Towards Re-Enchantment: Place and its Meanings, a book of commissioned writings reflecting on the meaning of re-enchantment. The grant concluded in 2011. Gareth and Di continue to share an involvement in Artevents and in the on-going life of the Re-Enchantment projects, and Gareth is an independent curator with Aldeburgh Music, the Whitechapel Gallery, and others.
