Maya Rose Edwards (She/Her/They/Them)

Winner
Royal Scottish Academy New Contemporaries: Selected Artist
I adopt a hunter gatherer approach to art making. A semantic magpie who reads objects and uses language like Lego bricks. I punctuate the linguistic landscape with aesthetic encounters, using this willingness to obstruct as a catalyst for poetic and sculptural happenings. At best a metaphor, in all things a contradiction, my work exists as acute observations with aim to uncover order within negative spaces. I want to establish how objects stand in place for us, challenging the sequence of the everyday to occupy the boundary between self and other. Always in series or cycle, closer to madness than reason, my work displaces the hierarchy of perception back to the realm of the pedestrian.

Roadworks Artist Book
The Roadworks are a series of established objects arranged to induce subtle occurrences within the everyday. Images and text have been curated into an artist’s book featuring photographs, absurdist materials lists and narrative titling that provides orientation around a sculptural installation. Experimental text accompaniments present a sardonic perception of the pedestrian experience, grounded in the repetitious contemplations of the common. Queering public spaces and objects of use, the Roadworks series highlights poetic moments of political frustration where the familiar always contains an element of the strange.