One of our partners, Outer Spaces, are currently in possession of a space in Edinburgh city centre that occupies the entire 6th floor of a building on Princes Street. It’s being used to show work in progress by Outer Spaces members working in other spaces, and they plan to invite local and national politicians and policy makers to meet them in the space as part of the SCAN (Scottish Contemporary Art Network) Art Matters campaign.
The goal is simple – to help promote what the charity and artists themselves do more widely throughout Scotland.
Below is a short bio on two very talented artists taking part in the exhibition.
Pandora Vaughn:
Pandora Vaughan is a UK/Canadian artist currently working between London and Scotland and is a member of Peer Social, a group awarded the Artquest Peer Forum Award at Cubitt, London in 2018. Vaughan has collaborated with architects on various projects and has also co- founded London artists group Grrrr!, co-producing a number of exhibitions and events in London, Wakefield and Los Angeles.
Working with confined spaces to explore their impact psychologically and interested in coercive landscapes, most of her work uses architectural plans as a starting point.
She studies how nostalgia is used for commercial gain, how politics inform formal design, and works with temporary habitats as a way of circumventing the sense of incarceration. Much of her work has centred around prisons, re-imagined as another kind of outdoor space.
Michael Bowdidge:
Michael Bowdidge is an artist, researcher, and educator who works with found objects, images, and sound.
He received his undergraduate degree in Fine Art from Middlesex Polytechnic in 1989, and completed his doctoral research at the University of Edinburgh in 2012. His PhD took the form of a practice-based investigation into the possibilities and context of contemporary sculptural assemblage considered in relation to the later philosophy of Wittgenstein and the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin.
Michael has been a member of faculty at Transart Institute since 2008 and currently supervises post-graduate and doctoral students there while also playing an active role as an Associate Artist at Whale Arts in Edinburgh and Slumgothic in Lincolnshire.
All of these activities enrich his teaching practice and his creative output equally – as, for him, these two areas of endeavour are fundamentally intertwined.
Michael regularly exhibits nationally and internationally and is represented by BendInTheRiver.
If you want to know more or have your own arts story to tell us, then don’t hesitate to get in touch!