Making things difficult: an afternoon in the country with Luke Evans

I am following Luke Evans through the country lanes of Herefordshire when he slams on his brake lights. He jumps out cheerfully and walks back to update me. “My studio is just down there but we’re going to have to wait because the farmer is taking his cows across the road.” It’s safe to say Luke’s choice of location is unusual. After the herd is ensconced in a new field, we drive into a charmingly ramshackle courtyard and Luke throws open the wooden doors to his studio. The contrast stepping through from the rolling fields of one of England’s most picturesque counties is jarring; suddenly we could be in any smart east London photo studio. There’s concrete floors and whitewashed walls and his pride and joy – a Sinar P2 8×10 camera – set up facing a huge pockmarked rock. But there’s quirkier touches too – a wall of power tools and a gleaming pole in the middle (where Luke’s boyfriend, a professional dancer likes to practise). Luke graduated from Kingston last summer and left London in the autumn. After a series of underwhelming meetings with agencies – “They told me I’d die if I was was stuck there working on Boots posters” – he resolved to develop his own practice rather than relying on commissions. “I needed to pay attention to what was going well, rather than what I thought may go well,” he says. “Once I realised that, I didn’t need to be in a certain place to make the work that I want to make. Why not come back to this remote, beautiful place in the middle of nowhere and see what happens?” Initially he found an extraordinary space, a 3,000 square foot former munitions factory which seemed to be the prefect base for his ambitious, unusual and often very large-scale work, but that fell through after the local council decided to sell it off for development. He looked at lots of options before being shown the one that would finally become this studio we’re standing in, but he admits he wasn’t immediately convinced. “It had a wattle and daub ceiling and the floor was dipped because of all the cows walking on it. It stank and it was literally falling to pieces. It took a massive leap of the imagination to think this is where I am going to base my work.” Lulu Ash: Luke Evans There is a young mother who lives in the cottage attached to the barn and when she found out Luke was a photographer she asked if he could do a portrait of her baby. “I am not sure she realised what sort of photographer I am,” he laughs. In fact he’s a hard creative to categorise. As a teenager he wanted to be a contemporary dancer, and moved to Berlin while studying for his A-Levels, rehearsing until 11pm, revising until 3am, sleeping for a few hours then starting all over again at 6am. He became interested in image-making and wanted a degree that combined practical skills and conceptual thinking, finding a natural home on the Kingston Graphic Design and Photography course. “There’s a romance about an artist roaming round having his spark – no, I’m sat on a chair grinding my brain out onto a sheet of paper." Luke Evans But Luke didn’t find it easy going at first. He visibly cringes remembering his first crit: “the worst thing I have ever done.” His group was given the bladder and told to respond to it in some way. “There were balloons and weird drawings; it was just like looking at someone who can’t think, the inside of their brain. After that I realised I had to do something different, so I was working, working, working, really racking my brains and trying to outwit myself.” He has a very rigorous way of developing his ideas, almost all of which begin as lists or statements he writes. “There’s a romance about an artist roaming round having his spark – no, I’m sat on a chair grinding my brain out onto a sheet of paper. Then I whittle it down into an idea and go off and see what works and what doesn’t. “I work slowly because I rip myself apart. I come up with an idea and think that’s not going to work or that’s not interesting or I just don’t care.” If the process sounds gruelling the results prove it’s certainly effective. Luke’s projects have ranged from Forge – where he created amazing miniature landscapes of raging seas and otherworldly plains on his kitchen table – to Xero, where he draws with electricity, firing a 400,000 volt Van der Graaff generator onto a piece of acrylic and visualising the effects using photocopying toner. I particularly like the series where he went round collecting the selfies people took (and left) on display models in Apple stores (so did the D&AD New Blood jury, and his Yellow Pencil sits proudly in his barn-cum-studio). There’s craft and cleverness and mischief in his work, as well as a giddy sense of “what if?” thinking that’s almost childlike in its purity. This combination is best exemplified in Inside Out, a collaborative project he did with Josh Lake as the final project in their first year. The pair ate 35mm film, let it pass through their digestive systems then scanned the film and exhibited the large