PEEPING TOM
EVELYN CROMWELL
July – October 2023
Evelyn Cromwell is an artist living and working in the North-East, where she has a studio at the Newbridge Project. After completing a Degree in Glass and Ceramics in 2017, she now enjoys making sculpture out of a range of materials and textures, with a particular focus on wood and plastic. This is in fact, the first piece she’s made using glass since graduating.
In her practice Eve likes to embrace the constraints that design offers as a starting point. Either using them as a guide to play with a functional objects’ existing form, or exploiting the qualities a material has to offer. What really makes her tick is the mundane, she likes how a ubiquitous object can come to represent the structures underpinning society.
“Peeping Tom” is a material study of glass in combination with the process of darkroom photography. What always drew Eve to glass was its optical qualities and the ability to be able to manipulate them. Windows come to represent invitations to the outside world or barriers, depending on the glass we choose to put in them, they can be symbols of haves and have-nots and a marker between a present and a future just out of reach.
To create the work Eve enlarged two photographs of windows she’d taken through textured glass in a dark room. Distorting the image in an analogue way, by refracting the light carrying the photo before it hits the paper. Shown alongside the original photographs, you can see the result, in one subtle tonal distortion and another almost unrecognisable swirly pattern.
For more information about Evelyn’s work see