Nina Edge
Nina Edge trained as a ceramicist in Cardiff and became known for subversive use of craft processes in shows with Black British artists in the 1980s. Using lowly techniques such as slip trailing, batik, and shisha embroidery she challenged ideas around identity and gender, exposing hierarchies and anomalies in the curation, and funding of cultural projects. Her interest in the status of people, materials and production methods lead to a series of artworks made from international currency, sugar, gold, keys, disposable nappies, and seeds.
Her work is designed to be understood by viewers who have no art education, as well as those who do. Initially known for scaled up drawing, subversive ceramics and radical textiles she expanded into public art and performance. She works alone and in collaboration with the communities where she lives and with similarly unbounded creative groups such as Hull Time Based Arts, Mori Roti, and Visual Stress. She has made interactive digital work, kinetic and mechanical objects, gardens, games and occasional massed performance work involving all comers. Her practice is socially engaged and she has made longstanding projects with communities wherever she lives. Productions include bi-lingual advertising hoardings, radical garments and seed dispersal schemes. She is currently showing large scale vinyl print, concerned with land clearances as part of a long investigation into demolition and forced removals in the Welsh Streets and similar neighbourhoods.
She is published by Third Text, International Journal of Art & Design Education, Feminist Art News, Liverpool University Press and Liverpool Biennial. Exhibitions include Virtual Duality (Bluecoat, 1994), Mirage (ICA, 1995) Transforming the Crown (Studio Museum in Harlem, 1997) The Fifth Floor (Tate Liverpool, 2008), Turning FACT Inside Out (FACT, 2013) Live work includes Sold Down the River (Bluecoat Liverpool,1995) and Habeas Corpus (Albert Dock, 2007)
Currently she is running a short course about how art and society are meshed at Tate Liverpool, producing community food maps with Squash Nutrition in Toxteth, and presenting large scale prints on the front of her home in the despoiled Welsh streets.
