Chrome and Halos

This painting is a portal to the 1990s - a decade where gender wasn’t just implied, it was prescribed in plastic. A Hot Wheels Lamborghini and a heroic Optimus Prime Transformer take centre stage - borrowed memories from my brother’s toy collection that felt impossibly cooler than the pastel, glitter-laced objects assigned to girls. These symbols weren’t just toys; they were early emblems of permission - of who got to lead, and who was expected to nurture.

On the opposite end of this spectrum floats an angel feeding a lamb - delicate, sweet, impossibly pure. It’s the visual language of girlhood as it was sold to us: delicate, soft, unquestioning. But the illusion fractures when you notice another symbol: a lower-back tattoo, the infamous ‘tramp stamp.’ Worn proudly by women of the era, yet weaponised by culture to shame them. It sits here in stark contrast to the angel - a rebellious echo above the halo.

Chrome and Halos exists in that layered space between purity and rebellion, chrome and innocence. It reflects on how identity was shaped - not by choice - but by shelves, screens, and subconscious rules. And now, as those childhood signifiers resurface through memory, I wonder: how much of it did we ever really choose?

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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.