Sol and Safety.
A review of Luca Evans’s soap sculptures, Sol and Safety.
Sol. 2019. Sunlight Soap.
Luca started sculpting first working on Sol. The inspiration behind the piece came from an article about forced sterilisation in Japan late in the 21st century. The now defunct Eugenics Protection Law allowed unconsented sterilisation to prevent the continuance of ‘poor quality’ genetics, and only this year (2019) the Japanese government apologised to tens of thousands of the programs victims, offering compensation. Luca’s piece Sol is named after the Spanish word for sun. This title reflects the act of shedding light on something and in the case of the pieces catalyst, shedding light on those specific events that took so long to come out.
The work depicts a bath plug, immediately creating ties to washing, cleanliness and ‘flushing something away’. This draws a haunting parallel between the children that were not able to be born and the bacteria that we gather on our hands on a daily basis. Something that can be scrubbed and washed away without consideration. Hygiene is necessary to our survival and ensures we don’t get sick. By allowing the EPL program, the Japanese government disregarded it simply as a similar process, something ‘necessary’ to achieve some sort of ‘dirt-free’ purity. Of course, it is not the same and the implications are tragic and radical.
The sculpture is also reflexive, as the soap medium has important connotations of washing and sanitisation that further tie Sol into that discourse. It also, however, has implications, meaning that the work is ‘dysfunctional’. If used, it would simply wash away itself. This represents the temporality and futility of the EPL program as it ultimately tries to stop diversity. Something that is both beautiful and unstoppable. Those laws simply could not be sustained as they violate human rights, which begs to question why they were ever implemented in the first place. They have now since rightfully dissolved like soap.
Sol is created in green. Luca was initially drawn to it as it was merely the largest bar of soap, however, after completion realised the colour itself carried important metaphors. The piece centres around a conversation about sterilisation relating to hygiene, germs and sanitisation and sterilisation relating to birth and the right to life. It is interesting to point out that these are slightly different sets of ideas. The one attains to the destruction of organic life, while the other to prevention. The use of the colour green draws more attention to that first set, focusing on ‘life and growth’ and viewing sterilisation not as something that takes away potential life, but actually takes away life itself and ends growth with death.
Safety. 2019. Sunlight Soap.
Luca’s second sculpture Safety centred around finding an object from his daily life. The sculpture is made from pink soap this time and resembles a box of Lion safety matches. Lion matches are made from wood, packaged in card and they produce small flames when struck against the film. Contrastingly, the medium of soap is related to water and wetness, thus the sculpture is again reflexive and points out the defect in its own material. While the bath plug is something that invites water, as does soap, matches and fire reject it, juxtaposing the ideas of wet and dry and presenting the viewer with an irony that cannot be solved.
On the topic of fire, we once again to return to the discourse of ‘shedding light on something’ that we entered in Sol. While Sol depicts the process of sterilisation and 'flushing out’, Safety represents justice and and end to the sterilisation practice. This ties the two soap works together and presents Safety as an intervention, or a point in time after Sol where the truth was revealed.
With the EPL finally over, the hospital spaces where those procedures were performed are now what feel most unsanitary and haunting.
Not only does Safety reflect a point of intervention but the matchbox itself, full of matches inside, can be seen as a symbol of fertility. It is also made from pink soap. This brings connotations that are very different to Sol, of both fertility and human anatomy. This contrasts the two works, with Sol depicting the struggle of life against sterilisation and Safety representing the eventual triumph. The two works have very different tones but work together to symbolise definitive points on the timeline of the haunting Japanese eugenics laws.
Talking about the medium.
Luca said it took time getting used to working with soap, especially as he wasn’t used to working reductively. It took trial and error but his skill improved a lot from Sol to Safety. Although he had worked with clay before he said that, “Soap is an unforgiving medium, once something breaks, there’s no going back. You have to work with it”. He also said it goes against how he normally works, as you have to carefully plan your execution, whereas he normally prefers to tackle his projects head on with an adaptive and exploratory approach. He said he, “had to learn to work slowly and precisely, with care”.
