Jim Ever is the recipient of the 2025 Yorkshire Graduate Award, a unique residency opportunity for a recent graduate from a Yorkshire-based university. Residencies have always been at the heart of YSP, offering opportunities for early career and emerging artists to reflect and move forward with their practice.
Ever recently graduated from Sheffield Hallam University with a BA in Fine Art. Their multi-disciplinary practice spans sound, collage, assemblage, image-making, video, installation, and sculpture. His work often brings together unexpected materials, exploring the relationship between analogue and digital technologies, and finding new conversations between traditional and experimental methods.
Ever spent two weeks in residence at YSP in January 2026 where he took inspiration from the Park’s natural landscape and historic trees to develop new work that reimagines our relationship with nature. His experiments with image-making, projection and sound will produce a large-scale, audio-visual installation for display in the Boathouse from 28–31 August 2026.
YSP is a place I have visited many times over the years and has made a significant contribution to the foundation of my practice. My first exposure to Barbara Hepworth’s work was at YSP, and I was inspired by how her The Family of Man sculptures ‘stood’ amongst the trees; they felt like almost an extension of the environment itself. Being offered the opportunity to return as a visiting artist is hugely fulfilling, and I believe this will be a major milestone in my practice. I’m looking forward to spending time on site to explore and reinterpret the landscape through my own approaches, and to have the opportunity to experiment.
-Jim Ever
Residency reflection
During my residency, I aimed to create a body of work that examines the passage of time at Yorkshire Sculpture Park. The ancient ash tree, possibly 500 years old, stands as a testament to this process. Its fragile existence, marked by open cavities and heavily pollarded branches, has been sustained through human intervention.
While I did have a studio on site, which I used as a base camp to store equipment and a space in which to reflect, I had a strong compulsion to be working outdoors. I was very interested in both the natural and constructed pulse of the site, capturing sounds of the ash tree by carefully attaching contact mics to its branches, making field recordings across the park, and recording the unheard sounds of the electromagnetic field within YSP’s interior spaces. Bracing against frequent heavy rain and at times darkness, I recorded my own experience during these two weeks, documenting the act of navigating the site through images and setting up homemade pinhole cameras that captured 2-week-long exposure photographs of the bare ash tree in its surroundings. The nature of this residency being more research-led means the piecing together must take place afterwards, off-site, and by exhibition time, the ash tree will be in full bloom, meaning the full cycle of its renewal will have taken place in the time in between. The images and sounds will be assembled, possibly alongside found materials gathered on site, culminating in an audiovisual exhibition and installation, contrasting the human perception of time with the slowness of landscape, and the intersection of the rural urban fringe.
