Visual Art

Welsh artist Cerith Wyn Evans’s solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, his first in the southern hemisphere, explores the mutability of light, space and sound. By Penny Craswell.

Cerith Wyn Evans’s solo show at MCA

A neon work by Cerith Wyn Evans at the MCA.

Credit: Hamish McIntosh

Cerith Wyn Evans, dressed in a flowing purple kimono over a white shirt and black skirt, is quietly exasperated by the compliments in the introduction by Museum of Contemporary Art curator Lara Strongman. He does not want to talk about the work but around it. About how the work responds to the exhibition space. About what his work stands for. “In the face of evil, in the face of Donald Trump, we have to be kind,” he says at the media launch. “My work stands against war.”

He wants to talk about music, about gardening, about Japan, about poetry. About his first visit to the botanic gardens in Sydney. His first encounter with a bin chicken: “that’s a sacred ibis”. About the fluidity of his work, he comments: “I try not to make everything a furnished completeness.”

When it comes to his new solo exhibition, .... in light of the visible, now showing at the MCA, Wyn Evans wants each person to experience his works without preconceived ideas. To make of them what they will. There are no labels on the walls to give a clue to the work, what it’s made of, what it means. Works are spaced out – much like his speech, which is scattered with thoughtful pauses – and interspersed with mirrors placed on all columns and some walls. The space is also dotted with imperceptibly revolving native plants.

A Welsh artist who splits his time between Norwich and London, Wyn Evans is probably best known for his series of neon “drawings”, called the Neon Forms (after Noh) (2015–ongoing). These larger than life-size scribbles are made of suspended lines of bright white neon. They look amazing in the space. It is hard to create a drawing that does not make you think of a face or a form, of letters or numbers, yet in these works are no recognisable shapes, signs or codes.

The lines are inspired by the choreography of Japanese Noh theatre, mapping the movements of the dancers through space. After the design is meticulously drafted and built in neon, each piece is hung individually from the ceiling from two or more spots, carefully spaced out to create this drawing at this time in this space. One of the larger neon drawings is Sydney Drift (2025), a work that was especially made for this exhibition – a complex piece that cuts through the air like the trailing effects of a sparkler.

Other works have meanings that are not comprehensible through looking, and knowing more about them would add substantially to the viewer’s appreciation. Two Gravity Gongs (2025), another work created for this exhibition, features two Japanese gongs wired up to emit a sort of humming that rises and falls, with the metallic sound of the gong infused within it. This is an eight-hour composition by Wyn Evans that uses ambient sounds he recorded at Circular Quay, including the boats, and at the Sydney Botanic Gardens, including the birds. Knowing this brings a whole new level to the work.

Another work that explores sound is Composition for 37 Flutes (2018), which is made of a computerised breathing unit, valve system, plastic tubes and 37 crystal glass flutes that hang from the ceiling in two circular arrangements, windpipes pointed out. This almost living, breathing work sends air through the flutes, both inhaling and exhaling according to a specific algorithm, creating a composition that is dissonant but not grating, like a hollow drone.

Phase shifts (after David Tudor) (2023), a series of smashed car windscreens suspended from wire, refers to something else – Marcel Duchamp’s work The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even, which was cracked in transit. Duchamp famously embraced the fault as part of the work. The windscreens dangle in thin air, twisting or reflecting their surroundings. They are part of a larger work that includes more neon drawings, plus StarStarStar/Steer (2019), a series of columns made of vertical light tubes so bright they almost hurt the eyes. Here, the three different pieces – smashed windshields, neon drawings and light towers – relate to each other, repeated in the white space with concrete floor, soft winter light from the window and mirrors that have been placed on the architectural columns. The effect of these reflections, subtle movements and repeated elements is gently disorienting.

Two works speak to Wyn Evans’s love of Japan, which he visits regularly. F=O=U=N=T=A=I=N (2020) consists of about 40 columns of Japanese characters rendered on a flat plane in white neon, suspended in the air. This refers to another Marcel – the text is Proust translated into Japanese. “It means something to me because it’s beauty,” Wyn Evans says. Katagami Screen (2015), a series of framed graphic works, features intricate patterns created with bleach using katagami – stencils traditionally used for dyeing and printing patterns on textiles.

Poetry features in another work, “Once more…” After J. M. (“The Changing Light At Sandover”) (2014), in which a single line of neon text in lower case reads: “once more revolving between poles, a gassy expansion and succinct collapse, ’till heaven is all peppered with black holes, vanishing points to the superfluous matter elided (just in time perhaps) by the conclusion of a passage thus”. This line of text on three walls of the gallery surrounds a series of transparent rectangular planes that are suspended from the ceiling. It’s an excerpt from a poem by American poet James Merrill, who wrote with the aid of ouija boards during seances.

The artist’s investigations into beauty, which are even more apparent when you understand the thought behind the works, are striking. But what is most interesting is their investigations of the in-between – the idea of breaking down categories between sound and music, for example, or understanding dance through sculpture. These works explore the boundaries of our understanding, blurring lines rather than pigeonholing, to ultimately create a richly rewarding experience.

.... in light of the visible is showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, until October 19.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 14, 2025 as "Neon logic".

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