ABOUT THE ARTIST:
Lauren Frances Evans is an artist, educator, and curator whose work explores the porous boundaries between body, spirit, and environment. Moving fluidly across sculpture, installation, and digital media, she examines transformation and interdependence through a lens informed by both material process and metaphysical inquiry. Her practice draws on scientific, spiritual, and mythological frameworks to reveal the unseen connective tissues—biological, emotional, and cosmic—that bind all things together.
Evans’s perspective is deeply shaped by her lived experience of neurodivergence and motherhood. As the parent of two children, Agnes (9) and Edie (4.5), she approaches artmaking as a form of reciprocal learning, attunement, and play—an ongoing negotiation between care, curiosity, and creative work. These embodied roles and rhythms continually inform the relational, tender, and sometimes chaotic systems that underlie her practice.
She is an Associate Professor of Art and Gallery Director at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama, where she teaches sculpture, installation, and time-based media. Her curatorial and pedagogical work often mirrors her studio practice: collaborative, sensory, and oriented toward wonder. Evans’s work has been exhibited nationally in galleries, museums, and experimental spaces, and she especially enjoys participatory projects that merge personal narrative, communal ritual, and material inquiry.
Learn more about her work at www.laurenfrancesevans.com
ABOUT SBTT:
Studio By The Tracks is a community arts studio serving artists on the autism spectrum. We provide opportunities for social connection and creative expression in a supportive, inclusive environment with all materials and instruction offered at no cost to our Studio Artists. SBTT’s Artist Residency program invites local and regional artists to create new works in collaboration with and inspired by SBTT artists. The program strives to enrich the experience of artists served directly by the organization while expanding SBTT’s audience, capacity to serve, and educational and cultural offerings available to the community. The program provides creative and economic opportunities to local artists in an inclusive, supportive, nurturing environment.
Learn more about SBTT at www.studiobythetracks.org
ABOUT THE PROJECT:
Becoming Wormtrain is an evolving, interdisciplinary project that blurs the boundaries between artmaking, research, and spiritual practice. This body of work emerged from Lauren Frances Evans’s 2024-25 artist residency at SBTT. During her time at SBTT, Evans spent several months collaborating with artist Jordan, whose deep enthusiasm for trains paralleled her own long-standing fascination with worms. Through weekly studio sessions, the two developed a series of fifteen Wormtrain drawings—hybrid forms created from Jordan’s train tracings, which Evans then rendered using water-soluble pastels. Their collaboration was grounded in parallel play and enthusiasm sharing, a connective mode often found in neurodivergent communities.
The accompanying newspaper, The Wormhole, was written and designed during the residency. It includes a personal essay reflecting on Evans’s lived experience of neurodivergence through the intersecting metaphors of the worm and the train—two seemingly opposite symbols that converge in the “wormhole” of creative process, attention, embodiment, and transformation. Part cosmology and part collaboration, Becoming Wormtrain envisions a world where worms, trains, and humans coexist as symbolic vessels of passage and transmutation.
