Lowri Evans has got a secret she can’t keep any longer: her life. Her secret life, no less. A scrapbook of memories; not only hers, but ours and everyone’s. A scrapbook that is already fading. All smiles and sparkles, Evans weaves us through threads of her childhood, of a long distance love affair between Brazil and Manchester, and of musings on being 30.

As a child, she is smoking twigs and dipping her toes into the boundless joy of making reverse-charge phone calls. As a lover, she is treading around the edges of countries and of a love that may never be. As a 30 year old (well, now a 31 year old, the piece was made last year), she is working out who to be. Snapped photos of her in a shopping centre flip through identities like outfits: a lycra-clad gym-goer who actually goes to the gym? A tailored nine-to-five-er? A wine-swigging, throwing-her-head-back in a cocktail bar kind of chic? A mother? A wife?

These glimpses come to us via sketches on acetate, projected photos on film and through Evans chatting to us. Narrating her life, she teeters on the edge of mischief. Brimming with warmth, she holds each moment with clarity and precision. As the gallery of her life fills up onstage – with musings from her notebook, a kind of operation-like wire loop game spelling “love”, and illuminated jars packed full of sand, illustrating the treasure of time – she is ever the charming curator.

Sharing this desire to make her mark on time’s shifting sands, Evans projects photos in which people have mapped the memories they are most afraid of losing onto steamed glass: long hot summer days, a first kiss, 40p bus fares. Yet even as they are written, these words have started to drip away, their content contorted and skewed.

The pages of her scrapbook fill up with lives lived and loves lost, with memories held and fading, with time slipping by, grain by grain. A real moment of tenderness arrives in the form of a recent phone conversation between Evans and her dad. Once again, she has reversed the charges. He says to her, “Is this an experiment? I know what you’re like.” They joke tenderly about the time she did it as a child; his chidings are now steeped in nostalgia, a hankering of what was and what is already passing, too quickly. It’s real and very sweet.

There are other touching moments and flashes of visual invention, but the secret life of her and us – perhaps inevitably – remains elusive. The feeling that this scrapbook has some pages missing is difficult to shake. The parts don’t quite match up and for all Evans’s charm, the piece takes on a brand of self-consciousness that it seems to work hard to shed. Evans, even as herself, feels like a staged character.

In part, this may be due to the fact the piece was created to mark Evans turning 30. Time’s sands have shifted and this is no longer real; the edges are already tinged with nostalgia. But maybe this is right where the secret lives exist, between us and each other. In the moments that, even as we live them, we are already afraid of losing; in the moments, and the lives, that we never really allow ourselves to know.