Decay and creation

Rust, corrosion and decay sound like the enemies of promise, suggesting the end of something rather than a beginning.

But for Darrell Evanes they represent a new start. At 47 he is making his artistic way in life by embracing the potential of junk, creating new sculptures which come into being with a ready-made patina of age.

His raw material is arranged on the concrete floor of his workshop just outside Harrogate. Browse around and your eye randomly falls on a dusty oil drum here, a copper hot water tank and a dead freezer over there. A set of old fashioned scales, off-cuts from girders, bike wheels, oily old tools, bits of a motorbike, a conveyor belt chain, wrecked aerosol cans and much more lie under a bench.

But this is no Steptoe’s yard. It’s ordered chaos because all the junk is neatly gathered in discrete collections. In fact to Darrell’s eye this is not chaotic at all.

“Everything under the bench gets used,” he says. Every one of the grungy items will eventually be turned into something else by the transforming power of his imagination.

It’s not a literal process. The end results are striking because they work subtly in a viewer’s mind at different levels.

For example there’s a model Spitfire on a plinth motif that he’s obviously keen on. There are a number of these sculptures whose outlines immediately call to mind the old plastic Airfix kits for children.

But his aeroplanes seem so rotten and eaten away that they might have been dug up out of the ground. These once virile Spitfires have become corpses that are falling to bits and look fragile.

In fact the sculptures are really robust. And discovering that they are indeed tough and durable contradicts those initial impressions that they are all about death and the perishing of fame and glory.

Closer inspection reveals the Spitfires’ plinths to be pressure plates from a car clutch. Elsewhere Darrell has used lengths of chain welded to other pieces of ironmongery for constructions that appear to defy gravity.

A Spitfire in a birdcage is a nod towards the French surrealists. Rene Magritte is a favourite of his. “I always aspired to be surrealist,” he says.

His materials and found objects have a variety of sources. “Sometimes I go to scrap yards with a purpose, a lot of friends bring stuff in,” he says. “I like things that have had a previous life.”

Darrell admits he’s a little unnerved about discussing what he does because he is not used to attention. For most of his early life he seems to have attracted the wrong sort. At 13 he was put into care for his own safety and sent to a boarding school near Scarborough.

“I was a problem child. I spent lessons in the corridor. Trying to retain the information in your head gets too much and so you kick-off.”

Information retention was tricky because he was severely dyslexic. “There was no name for dyslexia then, but I do owe a lot to them at that school. They gave me the chance to interact with people again.

“I knew nothing about the art world and I hated woodwork and metalwork. The only think I liked was technical drawing and working with French Curves.”

After school he spent 10 years labouring in a chicken factory in Ripon and had a family. Later he worked as a taxi driver in Harrogate. “In my world you didn’t have to spell. I also have aural dyslexia which means I don’t hear or see vowels. Everything’s an image to me.”

The turning point came when he signed up for a Btec course at Harrogate College where his dyslexia was properly diagnosed and he was given understanding treatment from the teaching staff. To pay his way he worked cleaning floors at a supermarket and offices floors during the evenings.

The Harrogate course was followed by a degree at Bretton Hall near Wakefield. “I had a battle to get to Bretton, but people at Harrogate College saw something in me.”

After graduation he found a computer job connected with internet animation. Made redundant from that, he took a job in a care home. Eventually he decided to strike out in the direction that interested him most.

He breaks off from explaining his work to lay down a plaid rug at his doorway in a pool of sunlight. Basil has come to call and needs somewhere to lie down. Basil is an amiable Jack Russell who belongs to Darrell’s friend Steve, a fellow artist who helped him start out by sharing his studio.

Darrell has just moved into his own adjacent unit where his permanent companion is Willow, a barn owl. The two neighbouring artists share a passion for saving injured birds.

At first glance this could be the workplace of a steel fabricator. There are hacksaws and goggles, a hand guillotine, vices, angle grinder and welder’s gloves. A welder’s mask hangs next to arc welding equipment and an oxygen cylinder. “I’m not really a welder,” he says. “But I learned how to do it at school.”

There are other items which would not be part of a steel fabricator’s working world – a couple of Action Man dolls (much better than conventional artists’ dolls for anatomy apparently), models of farm animals, an Airfix kit of a Harrier jump-jet and two plastic models of the Bismarck.

Darrell explores the power of memory and nostalgia further with a couple of Lancaster bomber sculptures, one with a bouncing dam-buster bomb attached. Another powerful gravity-defying work of a horse drawing a barge is based on a boat he once had called Margaret.

The sense of power and energy it creates is striking. This is also apparent in the impression of a falling man suspended in his descent by a large old fashioned key and a pair of pliers welded together. “It’s my take on Icarus,” says Darrell. “I made him from a Calor Gas bottle.”

There’s also a group of four horses in full gallop, one of those is falling too. The horse’s muscular flanks have a lovely enamelled appearance.

In a corner of his workshop is his Concept Box, a box file in which he places sketches of ideas to gestate. “Once I get going on them I tend to work quickly,” he says. “Sometimes I do things and don’t know why.”

Darrell Evanes’ work can be seen at the Mill Bridge Gallery, Skipton.