Bio
Massachusetts artist Evvie "Evvin" Marin explores themes of folklore, natural history, and subconscious fantasy through traditional watercolor and ink painting, music, and lyrical writing. They record under the artist name "Mocking Cricket." They draw inspiration from macabre art history, occultism, curiosities, marginalia, aestheticism, symbolism, and Golden Age book illustration. Evvin's work is colored by an animist worldview, and perspective as a chronically ill, nonbinary queer. They work in multiple media per necessity and strongly believe that entangled artistic practices support each other.
Evvin has a B.A. in set design and studio painting from Smith college, where they studied political theatre, propaganda, and the aesthetics of reflected and distorted light.
Evvin teaches solo tarot for creative misfits through their blog at Interrobang Tarot, and more recently, on Patreon. Artwork from Evvin’s tarot decks in progress was included in TAROT, by Jessica Hundley of Taschen’s Library of Esoterica, released August 2020.
Artist Statement
I seem always caught between holistic, lush dysphoria and tender fascination. I create in attempts to make lyrical if not rational sense of inner and outer landscapes. I like to fidget with the symbolic codes culture recycles over centuries, morphing with each telling like a record crackling into noise at the needle’s kiss, or memory warped through frequent retrieval into marbled, oneiric pageant of its history. These fluid things want fluid crafts—watercolor, brushed ink, and gouache—textured, gauzy media, on call for runny chaos or intense precision, who let all the layers and errors show through to the surface.
I work through symbol because metaphor and analogy make shiny and relatable what’s complex, uneasy, or emergent. Symbol transforms the personal and ephemeral into curios robust enough for display. Symbol obfuscates while revealing, and embroiders while fortifying what it catalogs. Symbol crams the whole maple back into the samara, and tucks it, spring-coiled and syrup-sticky, yet apparently weightless, into the beholder’s hungry palm.
