Edgework contributors take risks; conduct deep explorations of our cities' overlooked, forgotten and forbidden spaces; misuse, reclaim or appropriate architecture; test the boundaries of access; subvert surveillance technologies and pick apart cartography. They explore the margins of our urban spaces examining how we inhabit them, move through them and establish a sense of place. They are overland wanderers or remote viewers who reflect upon our relationship with nature and landscape.
Artists
Susan Collins
Susan Collins makes work in response to specific sites and situations. She explores using transmission, networking and time as primary materials.
Works include Transporting Skies which digitally transported sky (and other phenomena) live between Newlyn Art Gallery, Penzance in Cornwall and Site Gallery Sheffield in Yorkshire; Seascape, a solo show for the De La Warr Pavilion, which simultaneously recorded a panoramic series of Seascapes pixel by pixel over the course of a year from the South East Coast of England; and Underglow, a network of illuminated drains for the Corporation of London.
Collins is currently Slade Professor and Director of the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London where she established the Slade Centre for Electronic Media in Fine Art in 1995.
Layla Curtis
Layla Curtis’ practice has a focus on place, landscape and mapping and often examines the attempts we make to chart the earth, how we locate ourselves, navigate space and represent terrain.
Works include Trespass, an app for iphone which maps an oral history of a northern English edgeland and tempts the user to trespass in order to access the work; Polar Wandering, a 27,856 mile long interactive online drawing charting her journey to Antarctica exhibited in solo shows at New Art Gallery Walsall, and Ormeau Baths Gallery, Belfast; and Tong Tana, a moving image work made while trekking with nomadic hunter-gathers in the Borneo Rainforest and exhibited at Matt's Gallery, London.
Curtis' work features in international collections including the Tate Collection and Government Art Collection.
Peter Cusack
Peter Cusack is a field recordist, sound artist and musician with a long interest in the environment.
Cusack initiated the Favourite Sounds Project to discover what people find positive about soundscapes where they live, and Sounds From Dangerous Places (sonic journalism) to investigate major environmental damage in areas such as the Chernobyl exclusion zone and the Azerbaijan oil fields. He produced Vermilion Sounds - the environmental sound program - for ResonanceFM Radio, and was DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin 2011/12, initiating Berlin Sonic Places that examines relationships between soundscape and urban development.
Cusack is currently a research fellow at the University of the Arts, London.
Andy Day
Andy Day's work examines the body’s relationship with the built environment, willful misuse of architecture, subversive practices, appropriation of space and place, edgework and social interaction.
Day documented the rise of parkour through photographing its communities in London in the early 00s and continues to play a role in shaping its visual culture today. Often Day works with climbers as they deliberately misinterpret architecture, finding new uses for both public and private space. In his series Former, Day explored Tito-era monuments across former Yugoslavia in collaboration with parkour athletes from Serbia and Croatia.
Day recently received a distinction for his MA in Photography and Urban Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London and is a member of the Urban Photographers Association
Alec Finlay
Alec Finlay is an artist, poet and publisher whose work crosses a range of media and forms, from sculpture and collage, to audio-visual, neon and new technologies. Much of Finlay’s work reflects on our interaction with nature and considers how we as a culture, or cultures, relate to landscape.
Finlay often works collaboratively, weaving together art and text to create generous experiential works, some mapped directly onto the landscape, others woven into the fabric of our social selves. Projects include The Road North, a contemporary word map of Scotland across a year-long journey through its landscape, and A Company of Mountains, commissioned by ATLAS Arts, which comprises 14 conspectuses on the Isle of Skye for viewing hills and mountains, photographs, word-mntn drawings, illustrations and a blog.
In 2010 Finlay was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize.
Joy Gerrard
Joy Gerrard’s practice investigates protest crowds and occupation of urban spaces, archiving media images from the Trump Resistance, Occupy movement, Arab Risings and many more.
Exploring the historical and iconographic qualities of these images, her studio-based work (re)presents them in detailed pen and ink drawings, and more recently large ink works on canvas. In her work, the figure of the crowd comes to suggest the expression of collective agency. These crowds are persistently viewed from above, from tall buildings or news helicopters, and contained within historical architectures that at once give them form and constrain them.
Gerrard has installed multiple public installations since 2004 including major works in the London School of Economics (Elenchus/ Aporia, 2009) and Chelsea and Westminster Hospital (Assemble/Move/Map, 2012)
Lucinda Grange
Adventure photographer and urban explorer Lucinda Grange explores the limits of the built environment, accessing places and spaces that are for most unseen, hidden or simply out-of-bounds.
Grange has climbed and accessed some of the world’s most iconic structures, often at night and without permission, to capture images of the cityscapes below. Her work raises questions about access and ownership in the urban environment. Notable works include those made at the top of the Chrysler Building, New York, the Great Pyramid of Giza, Notre Dame, Paris, the Angel of the North, London’s Battersea Power Station, and the Firth of Forth Rail Bridge. As well as scaling buildings and bridges, Grange delves below the city exploring hidden rivers and infrastructures such as abandoned subway stations and labyrinthine sewage systems.
Grange was included in the Times Alternative Rich List 2017
Graham Gussin
Graham Gussin explores location, time and transport using a variety of media including film, video, sound, photography, sculpture and drawing.
Works include Lens, a series of photographs exploring film and real space shot in and around a hotel on the coast of Portugal, the location for Wim Wenders 1981 film The State of Things; Illumination Rig, an installation/event using a film lighting rig to explore the relationship between film, time and space; and Remote Viewer, a two-screen video and film work shot both in Iceland and London which engages with ideas of distance and proximity.
Gussin is a lecturer at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College of London. His work is in the Tate Collection and is currently on display at Tate Britain.
Nicky Hirst
Nicky Hirst’s work is perhaps best described as an exploration of serendipity, where sources may be particular places, objects or words whose meaning she subtly shifts by manipulation, juxtaposition or context. Hirst writes: ‘I think it is about language and ambiguity. It is about trying to unearth something. It is about possibility and the way things connect.’
After studying Fine Art followed by Art and Architecture, Hirst pursued a parallel practice showing in galleries and working collaboratively with architects for diverse projects within the public realm. These public art projects include the Biochemistry Department University of Oxford, Bulgari Hotel in Knightsbridge, Kingfisher Court NHS Mental Health Facility in Hertfordshire, Pharmacy Manufacturing Facility in Guy’s Hospital, London, and most recently Y Bwthyn Palliative Care Unit in Wales. Hirst has exhibited in museums and galleries including the Courtauld Gallery, Royal Albert Memorial Museum, South London Gallery, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery and Imperial War Museum.
Lee Maelzer
Lee Maelzer is particularly interested in exploring redundant sites and discarded objects and finding visually poetic meaning in them. Subjects for her paintings, collages and photographic works include trailer parks, dimly lit interiors full of clutter, abandoned habitations, ruins and partially demolished buildings. Her landscapes tend to be slightly charged with the possibility of an impending sinister event.
Maelzer exhibits internationally and has undertaken several residencies including Artistic Crossing, Tunis, Tunisia, Directional Forces, Psarades, Greece, JOYA residency, Los Gasquez, Spain, Deviant Art Festival, Kunsthallen, Trollhattan, Sweden, Storefront Artists’ Project, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Abbey Fellowship, British School at Rome, Italy, and an Arts Council of England Fellowship, Colima, Mexico.
Lee Maelzer was twice shortlisted for the John Moores Exhibition.
Miranda Whall
Miranda Whall works with film, music, text and performance in an attempt to experience and understand mountains and their stories.
Whall’s recent work Crossed Paths is a three-part project spanning Wales, Scotland and France. Part one focuses on the bio-diverse Welsh Cambrian Mountains, where Whall crawled along 5.5 miles of sheep tracks wearing a sheep fleece and 15 lightweight, waterproof cameras. Crossed Paths was exhibited at Oriel Davies Gallery, Newtown, UK in 2018. Part two will take part in the Scottish Cairngorms and exhibited at Perth Concert Hall, Perth, UK in 2019/20.
Solo exhibitions include Passage, Institute of Contemporary Art, Bath, Untitled, Ne-Na Contemporary Art Space, Chiang Mai, Thailand; and Is it ok If, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Wales, 2010.
Miranda Whall is a full-time lecturer and course director of the Creative Arts Degree at Aberystwyth University.
Simon Woolham
Simon Woolham’s work is primarily concerned with occupied spaces and the narratives that unfold within them: school playing fields, underpasses, ditches, unofficial dumps and other suburban sites near Wythenshawe, South Manchester, where he spent his childhood.
Simon has exhibited widely, including solo exhibitions at the Lowry in Salford in 2004 and Chapter Gallery in Cardiff. In 2008 he was included in the first Tatton Park Biennial and in 2006 was Artist-in-Residence at the Baltic in Gateshead. Woolham was a studio artist from 2008 to 2012 at Wysing Arts Centre near Cambridge where the foundation of his recently completed practice-led Ph.D. research was laid. His work was shown as part of Soft Estate a group show at the Bluecoat in Liverpool and Spacex in Exeter.
Woolham is also curator and artistic programmer of the artist-led gallery PAPER, based in Manchester.
Elsewhere
Elsewhere is an English-language print journal dedicated to involved and intelligent writing about place, whether from travel writers or local ramblers, deep topographers or psychogeographers, overland wanderers or edgeland explorers.
Published within the pages of Elsewhere are drifting excursions through city suburbs and journeys on foot along the ancient old ways; written sketches of airports and market squares, forests and riverbanks; the legends that linger on mountainsides and the folklore of the flatlands; the everyday realities of island communities and the streetlife of city neighbourhoods.
Elsewhere also features interviews with those for whom place is central to their work, whether photographers, artists or filmmakers, craftspeople, historians or musicians. There is also space for those places that exist only in our heads – whether lost but remembered, or imagined and invented.
The co-founders of Elsewhere are Editor in Chief Paul Scraton, and Creative Director Julia Stone.
Publications
Ways to Wander
Ways to Wander is a collaborative project between Clare Qualmann & Claire Hind. The publication brings together 54 walking proposals from artists involved in the Walking Artists Network and is intended for anyone who makes, or wants to make, walking art or walk-performances – and for anyone interested in psychogeography, radical walking, drift and dérive.
Including contributions from: Alison Lloyd, who suggests you take yourself 'contouring' in the uplands for a day; Gary Winters & Claire Hind who invite you to 'blow a bubble and follow its path'; David Prescott-Steed who proposes you shout 'hello' into urban subterranean drain and wait for 'friendly voice to greet you back'; and Clare Qualmann who asks you to map walking routes in your local area that are problematic for pushchair/buggy/stroller use.
Ways to Wander is published by Triarchy Press.