Exhibition
Rafael Pérez Evans, Brown Notes I, 2026. C-type photograph. Courtesy the artist
Brown Notes is a solo exhibition by Spanish-Welsh artist Rafael Pérez Evans, bringing together shattered glass, ready-made sculpture, live plants and sound to explore togetherness and defiance under the pressures of failing care.
The title borrows from the myth of the “brown note”: an infrasound frequency believed to cause involuntary loss of bodily control. In the exhibition, that low, unrelenting vibration gives form to state-induced fear: the acute pressure of depending on systems that are overstretched and withdrawing support.
Pérez Evans traces how pressure builds within communities pushed into breakdown, and how this tension erupts into physical form. At the centre of the exhibition is an imagined landscape of shattered glass, as if every window of every UK GP surgery, smashed by patients in crisis, had been gathered into a single space. The light-blue hue of the material evokes a cold, ruinous landscape of institutional care: a system already broken before any glass was.
Waiting-room chairs sit beside the glass, with stones resting on the seats and floor, ready to be picked up. A familiar song, Stand by Me, plays quietly through a speaker, like the soft background music of a GP waiting room. Elsewhere in the space, a chorus of struck stones can already be heard.
In a gesture inspired by the late experimental socialist composer Cornelius Cardew, visitors are invited to follow an open score and strike stones together. These sounds join the phantom chorus already present in the room: a chorus for those still waiting and those who could not wait any longer. The song shifts from comfort to demand, making waiting audible as something shared, defiant and alive.
The exhibition also traces fugitive routes through failed care: desperate exits, the paperwork of Dignitas, and the fragile structures of mutual support people make in order to keep going. A sense of crip time runs through the space: fast-lived and urgent.
Brown Notes refuses repair. To restore things to how they were would mean returning to a system that was already broken. Instead, Pérez Evans asks what it might mean not to clean up, to remain in the ruins, and to sing together from there.
Brown Notes is supported by The Henry Moore Foundation, The Office for Cultural and Scientific Affairs (OCSA) of the Embassy of Spain, The Institute Cervantes in London, and CELF.
Special thanks to Ezra Badou for dramaturgical support, Lola Pederson for production assistance, sound engineer Adam Ben David & Jon Roome, and the Ruskin School of Art.
Rafael’s doctoral research is supported by Open-Oxford-Cambridge AHRC DTP studentship and The Queen’s College, Oxford scholarship.
Artist profiles and statements
Rafael Pérez Evans
Rafael Pérez Evans (b. 1983) is a Spanish-Welsh artist and educator based in Oxford. He holds an MFA and BFA from Goldsmiths, University of London, and is currently an AHRC Doctoral Scholar working towards a DPhil in Fine Art at the University of Oxford. He was awarded a Sculpture Fellowship from the Henry Moore Institute in collaboration with Leeds Beckett University (2021).
Pérez Evans works with sculpture, installation, and sound to think from and with fractured communities. His practice explores breakdown as both a lived condition and a potential site of liberation, shaped by queer, rural, and disabled life. The materials he works with are often unstable, mirroring the degraded lands, voices, and bodies that have been devalued and rendered surplus.
Recent exhibitions include: Horizontals at Wakehurst, Kew Gardens (2026); Upgrade: Orchids for Potatoes at CAAC Museum, Spain (2024); Lull at Workplace, London (2024); Dust Bathers at Queer Circle, UK (2023); Pica at TEA Tenerife, Spain (2022); Unpacking, Wheels at Royal Academy, South London Gallery and Leeds Art Gallery, UK (2019–2022); Handful at Henry Moore Institute, UK (2021); Thief, Invigilate at C3A Córdoba, Spain (2020); The Devil’s Bird: Ornithomancy at MOCA Taipei (2019); L’Dounne: Divination at Matadero, Madrid (2018); and Pavo Realengo at Nogueras Blanchard, Barcelona (2017).
