on the edge of the land
on the edge of the city
Exploring many lost and underused spaces around Seafield, the various projects considered the way we encounter these largely unregulated landscapes.
‘non places are there to be passed through’
Marc Auge ‘Non-places’
Download Project Newspaper (pdf)
“Edgelands, by and large, are not meant to be seen, except perhaps as a blur from a car window, or as a backdrop to our most routine and mundane activities”
‘Edgelands: Journeys into England’s true wilderness’ Paul Farley & Michael Symmons Roberts, 2011
Rosy Naylor ‘Verges’
a 2-part work at Porty Light Box and Seafield Promenade, connecting walking spaces on the edge of Kassel & Munster, Portobello & Leith, involving planting, and artist bookwork.
Deirdre Macleod ‘Playing Up’
a series of ground and wall drawings in the edgeland spaces at the Seafield end of Portobello Promenade. Viewers were invited to play and move within the drawings, suggesting sets of rules or procedures for playing, moving, or otherwise using, the marked-out spaces of the drawings.
Jenny Pope ‘Barely adequate is not enough’
Seen from afar, a line of orange rocks near the high tide line on the ripraps at Seafield Beach. Closer inspection reveals the structure of individual rocks covered in a geotextile material, usually used to isolate contaminated ground, used here to highlight recent poor quality of seawater recorded here.
Alix Villanueva ‘Tangle’
a visual walk through the mysterious, complex and historical relationship that humans have with seaweed, a series of five boards that line the shore and impart walkers with intimate and visual stories of the often forgotten seaweed.
Fiona Hermse ‘The Life Between’
Through the use of flowers, spices, fabric and thread, the last section of the prom is adorned with colour, highlighting the open spaciousness and the many surfaces of this location. With collaborative performance from dancer, Emma Snellgrove.
Daniele Sambo ‘Door in the Wall’
Daniele uses the language of photography to create a series of temporary interventions opening a door, a transparency, into what is behind, working often with unvisited or closed to the public places. Locations include Lothian Bus Dept (left), Pipe Street toilets (right) as well as Portobello’s Bottle kilns.
Juliana Capes ‘Tidings’
Using the furthermost part of Seafield beach, Juliana experiments with the idea of a beach and the sea and their edges. New sculptural experiments with time and tide. Featuring collaborations with artist Alice Betts.
Felicity Bristow and Susie Wilson ‘Im-PRESS-ions of Porty’
Bristow+Wilson invite visitors to Meadows Yard Nature Reserve (Craigentinny) to work with them to record the areas biodiversity and local weather conditions through the making of cyanotypes using collected plant materials with the results displayed at A449 Architects.
Emma Macleod and Abi Lewis ‘Meadow Morphose’
Also at Meadows Yard artists Macleod+Lewis invite participants into an other worldly habitat of creatures traversing the paths and desire lines of this little known nature reserve. Accompanied by artist talks and storyteller tour with Daniel Allison.
HERE+NOW ‘A Walk in Our Sho[r]es’’
an experiential audio art walk simultaneously exploring the sensory, landscape and potential qualities of Seafield, Portobello, Edinburgh, and Sydhavnen, Copenhagen. HERE+NOW landscape architects (Edinburgh) collaborated with Studio Debris (Copenhagen) to deliver two parallel ‘twinned’ audio walks.
Exhibition at A449 Architects, Portobello High Street 2017
Edgelands was supported by National Lottery Awards for All
Project curation + design – Rosy Naylor