A Place in the World explores the career of a visionary artist, Garth Evans through a 60 year arc of restless invention and surprising turns of fate. Garth’s work is infused with visual and tactile acuity and at times, self-deprecating humor. The film takes us from his working-class British childhood to the heights of the British art world and his career in the U.S. In the 1970s, he helped develop radical teaching methods at the Slade School that are considered iconic today.  

A centerpiece of the film is the story of an enormous work in steel that Garth installed on the street in Cardiff, Wales in 1972. The people of Cardiff, unaccustomed to abstract art, reacted vociferously. Undaunted, Garth recorded their reactions. The 50 year odyssey of that sculpture involves mystery, surprise and delight and speaks eloquently about the project of making public art.

A Place in the World is an opportunity to see the world through Garth’s eyes and the remarkable evolution of objects small and large that have come from his studio. It’s about the challenge of finding new territories to explore, and the complex conversation between the artist and those who experience the work. Finally, it’s about a deep dedication to creativity and a life well lived.

Garth Evans is central to the narrative of British sculpture. He relocated to the U.S.A. in 1979. Over one hundred one-person exhibitions of Evans’s work have been held by museums and commercial galleries. His work has been featured in countless group exhibitions including major surveys of British sculpture. His work is held by major public collections in the U.S.A. Great Britain, Europe, South America and Australia, including M.O.M.A and the Tate Gallery. His two most recent exhibitions are, But Hands Have Eyes Six Decades of Sculpture, Chapter, Cardiff, South Wales. 2019, Garth Evans, Retrospective, Trio Al Blanco, Guadalajara, Mexico. 2020, Publications on Evans’s work include Garth Evans, Sculpture, Beneath the Skin, edited by Ann Compton, published by Philip Wilson, London in 2013. Evans has a significant reputation as a teacher and was one of the primary architects of the now legendary “A” course, St. Martin’s School of Art, London, 1969 – 73. In 2019 MIT published a comprehensive documentation of the Course, The Locked Room, Four Years that Shook Art Education. Evans was responsible for the work in Sculpture at the New York Studio School from 1988 – 2016.

Jeanne Jordan is an Oscar-nominated, Emmy and Peabody winning documentary and fiction filmmaker.  Work she produced and directed with her husband Steven Ascher includes TROUBLESOME CREEK (Sundance Grand Jury Prize and Academy-Award nominee); SO MUCH SO FAST (Sundance nominee, PBS Frontline); RAISING RENEE (Emmy nominee, HBO);  and OUR TOWNS (HBO). She was Series Producer of POSTCARDS FROM BUSTER (twice Emmy nominated).  Jordan edited two films of the groundbreaking civil rights series EYES ON THE PRIZE which won the DuPont Columbia Award, and films for American Experience.  Her dramatic feature work includes several films for American Playhouse, including NOON WINE, LEMON SKY and the Emmy-winning series CONCEALED ENEMIES.

Jordan graduated from the University of Iowa and has twice been honored with a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She has taught filmmaking at Harvard and in master around the world.  Among her awards are the Prix Italia, a Peabody award, an International Documentary Association Distinguished Achievement Award and she was nominated for a Directors Guild of America Award.

David Shayne is a filmmaker in New York. He has worked on the editorial teams of three New York Times Op-Docs, the HBO docu-series Love Has Won (2023), and the documentary feature Some Kind of Heaven (2020). His directing credits include short films on the composer Arnold Schoenberg and the town of Lewiston, Maine, as well as a handful of music videos. He is currently in production on a documentary feature due next year. David grew up in Nashville and studied economic history and filmmaking at Harvard College.