GO/CO-CREATE [for students]

How can students respond creatively to the work of artists or scholars who interrogate Black or African identities in Europe? What questions will they ask, and what visions will they create?

Masterclass with Mary Evans (Director of the UCL Slade School of Fine Art) and Candace Scarborough.

Mary Evans

Before joining the UCL Slade School, Mary Evans was the BA Fine Art Course Leader at the Chelsea College of Art, University of the Arts London (UAL) for five years. Prior to that, she taught on the BA Fine Art course at Central Saint Martins, UAL. As an educator, she is invested in challenging barriers to education and widening access to the arts.
Having studied at Goldsmiths, University of London and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Mary Evans is an artist with a national and international reputation, having exhibited extensively as a solo artist and in group exhibitions. She has received numerous significant commissions, awards and residencies, including a Smithsonian Artists Research Fellowship at the National Museum of African Art, Washington DC in 2010.

Her research centres on the social, political, geographical and historical frameworks of diaspora, migration, global mobility and exchange. In her practice Evans uses brown kraft paper and other disposable materials to interrogate sites, stories, place and belonging, often in the form of large-scale site and research responsive installations. She explores the power relationships between Africa and Europe while moving across the real and imagined, mapping the ephemeral and unmappable. The silhouette, a well-known European visual device, is utilised to make the black body visible as a site for historical and contemporary narratives of resilience, mobility, geography, and memory.

Candace Scarborough

Before moving to London to study as a postgraduate student in History at the University of Roehampton in 2021, Candace worked as a performer, choreographer, and educator based in Baltimore, Maryland. She has performed and collaborated with various artists and companies including Helen Simoneau Danse, PearsonWidrig DanceTheater, Orange Grove Dance, and Kendra Portier/BANDPortier. Candace trained with Batsheva Dance Company and was a certified Gaga Movement Language teacher from 2017-2024. Her choreographic work has been presented at the Kennedy Center’s Millennium Stage, The Clarice, Dance Exchange, Joe’s Movement Emporium, Highways Performance Space and Baltimore Theater Project. Along with her artistic collaborator Samantha Mohr, Candace received a 2019 Rubys Artist Grant to create velvet pony, which premiered as a live-action and animated film in 2021. 

Her work as a historian examines the experiences of marginalised groups in the late medieval and early Tudor period, with a focus on African presence in England and women's careers at the Tudor court. Her practice explores how embodiment and choreographic process can support historical enquiry. She is also interested in investigating the potential for heritage sites to serve as communicators of archival knowledge through performance and screen dance projects.