A Mind's Graffiti​​

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If you forget,

I will recollect

how you made me feel—

your grace,

your strength to resist,

the places you lived:

between the cracks

where wildflowers grow,

pushing through asphalt,

re-seeded,

clambering toward better days.

 

And I will re-write your name

over and over.

Indexical, until the ink runs out.

In all the missing spaces,

scribbled marginalia—

pages where you should be.

 

And when I can’t write,

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my mind’s graffiti

will remember and celebrate.

 

And where I cannot remember,

I will imagine

that you had a life,

and some connection to me—

like one who rescues the tiny bird.

 

Limpid memory.

And where you leave no trace,

no print,

I will lay one down.

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Your gentle hand is here:

in all the books never written,

the pages never read,

in every dropped or lonely thread,

and each lost mind.

 

All I want

is breath enough

to fill a cup with you.

 

I stand aside

to let you through—

let me be still

in the sound of grass growing,

the new bud on a tree.

 

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By Alice Evans

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​Alice Evans is a writer, filmmaker, and visual artist whose work is multidisciplinary. Her work combines poetry, film, performance, and fine art to explore the thresholds between perception, memory, and place. The work she creates is shaped by lived experience of neurodivergence. Her voice demonstrates states of uncertainty, fragmentation, and transformation. The work is heavily influenced by both academic and creative curiosity. Alice holds a PhD in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Art, where her research explored Brechtian subjectivity in artists’ moving image. Her MA at the Royal College of Art, focused on psychological dissociation and staged photography. These explorations influence a broader investigation into narrative rupture, emotional landscapes, and the politics of representation. Her undergraduate work focussed on Denis Diderot, Robert Rauschenberg and Jeff Wall.

 

Alice’s poetry often emerges through a non-linear, fragmentary style that mirrors the texture of lived experience, particularly as it relates to environmental precarity, solitude, memory, and the body. Influences on her work include Rimbaud, Rilke, Derek Jarman and Laurie Anderson. The work is lyrical and has a distinct sensorial intensity.

 

Her poetry has been featured at the Lancaster Lit Fest, where it was curated by poets Eoghan Wells, Malika Booker and Hannah Lowe. This work was included in the 2022 publication Indivisible published by Commonword, Manchester. Her film-poetry has been screened internationally including: the Los Angeles International Poetry Film Festival, Massachusetts Independent Film Festival, and CRASSH at Cambridge University, UK. A recent film-poem, Laundry Isle is a layered meditation on landscape, weaving spoken word with atmospheric imagery.

 

She also works as lyricist and vocalist for The Arcane Hope, a spoken-word and art-rock project. Fusing poetic text with sound and occasional live performance, the project is part of a wider commitment to interdisciplinary narrative work.

 

Her artwork has been exhibited widely, including: ‘Visions in the Nunnery’ (curated by Tina Keane), The Nunnery Gallery, London; the Bridport ‘From Page to Screen’ Festival; and Lancaster Art Fair. She has also engaged in residencies including at HOME arts centre in Manchester. Other activities include: the University Women in the Arts Mentorship, the COLLIDE shortlist at CERN, and she has been awarded Arts Council Support.

 

A long-standing advocate for kindness and sensitivity towards those with lived experience of mental health conditions, Alice has contributed to national conversations through platforms such as BBC Radio, Metro, Mind, and Refinery29; often highlighting the intersections between creativity, vulnerability, and recovery. Her public projects, such as the Cerebration podcast www.cerebration.co.uk, reframe personal experience through poetic and socially engaged forms.

 

Across all creative media, Alice seeks to challenge conventional modes of storytelling, offering fractured, multi-voiced alternatives that are simultaneously critical and intensely felt.

 

She works at her studio in Lancaster. www.aliceevansfineart.co.uk