Taking influence from his Hackney neighbourhood, Dick Evans’s sculptures draw from the gritty culture of urban experience and its impact on personal cognition. In Black Grape, Evans’s giant wave towers over the viewer with an air of monumental sadness. Made from silicone carbide, a material used for grinding rocks and cutting diamonds, Black Grape captures an obsidian swell, a metaphor for existential crisis, desire and grief. Personifying his raw force of nature with fag butts and a beverage can, Evans renders a sense of human in efficacy in the face of immense beauty and devastation. The palm tree on the drink logo mirrors the curvaceous composition of the wave; Black Grape is a brand of soda popular in the fringes of London society.

Comprised of a sculpted hooded jumper connected to a hydroponics unit, Dick Evans’s Hoodie broaches abstraction with a multiplicity of cultural references. Using drug paraphernalia as a kind of plinth ― as a foundation for altered perspective, and as a source and receptacle for the endless cycle of dripping water that perspires from the sculpture ― Evans’s sweatshirt is bolstered as a totemic psychological portal. Hanging as a vacant shroud, Evans’s jacket invokes associations to both chav fashion and religious garb. Coated in wax, the draping suggestion of a figure is given a malleable tarry skin, through which embedded tubes emit sweat-like streams of water, creating an image of addiction, suffering, and catharsis. The faint sounds of ‘rain drops’ caused by the precipitatious cycle give the piece an air of contemplative sadness.