Brylcreem

Humming with the quiet echoes of personal history, this small acrylic painting on canvas board unfolds as a layered collage of scent, touch, and time. Its title nods to the hair product my father used each morning, a fragrance that lingers in memory like a signature of care and routine, echoed in the image of his slicked-back hair and the familiar chair he would sink into after work. Floating above, an early Nokia mobile phone marks a first taste of independence, its pixelated screen once heavy with teenage secrets, while an old-fashioned paper library card recalls afternoons spent with my grandfather, wandering hushed aisles in a world before screens dictated knowledge. A final note of joy appears in the form of a 1990s McDonald’s Happy Meal toy - small, playful, and sincere - bringing the work together as a love letter to the past, painted slowly in acrylic and devoted to the ordinary objects that shape us and refuse to fade.

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Coris Evans is a visual artist based on Bundjalung Country in Byron Bay, Australia. Her practice explores memory and longing, using familiar objects and symbols to trace how personal history lingers in everyday life.

After losing her mother to cancer as a teenager, memory became something to return to - a place where time slowed, where tenderness endured, and where her mother still lived. Evans’ paintings and sculptural works draw on ordinary objects as emotional anchors: a well-worn mug kept beyond its use, an old mobile phone once filled with teenage secrets, the lingering scent of a parent’s hair product. These details become quiet carriers of feeling, transforming intimate memory into shared experience.

Working primarily with sustainable and recycled materials, Evans views care for the environment as inseparable from care for memory itself. Her process is slow and deliberate, guided by responsibility - to material, to narrative, and to the world her work inhabits. Through her practice, Evans invites viewers to reflect on what we hold onto, what we lose, and the objects we return to when we want to remember who we were.