LUCA EVANS
(b. 1994, South Africa)

Luca Evans is a Cape Town based artist working primarily with wood and text.

Their work sits in a playful and delicate intersection between tradition and alteration, linguistics and visual art.
Sometimes they place the viewer in the position of a phonetician, a branch of linguistics which
studies how humans produce and perceive sounds.

‘How do you write sound? How do you signify it? Text and sound bump into each other and
spill out. Words work hard. They signify meanings and ideas and actions all at once. Sound
words work hard too; it’s not easy signifying sound. Our lexicons are filled with onomatopoeia.
Chomp, hiccough, beep, fizz, splash, pop, honk, crack, thud, oomph. I used to work in
linguistics. We transcribed sound, rendering it legible. They made an international alphabet
of sounds. k/ ræ∫ bæÅ‹ pft. So I started wondering if maybe objects can be sounds. See a
mousetrap and hear a snap. This room is filled with sounds. It’s a cacophony, but your head has
to fill in the sounds.’                   - Luca Evans