Nina Edge British
There are two series of works showing at Ruup & Form for Vice and Virtue.
The four black-framed gold collage works have come fresh from the 2023 exhibition at Tate Britain ‘Women In Revolt’. They were made by tearing and cutting self-portraits made with crayon and pigment pens reassembled on gold card. The pieces articulate the experience of being simultaneously exoticised and demonised and were made in the 1980s at a time when racial politics were a quagmire. Rather than be bogged down, these images were created as cultural reply to racism. The titles were a way to to diffuse threats and insults, by transforming them into absurd slogans and jokes. To have the last laugh. They were produced for Jagrati – An Exhibition of Work by Asian Women Artists. The exhibition was held in 1986 at the Greenwich Citizens Gallery in Woolwich, London, and was funded by the Greater London Council.
The collection of square framed drawings are also made with crayons and pigment pens. They are concerned with the impulse for humans to act on their ambitions for improvement. The audience are invited to contemplate the ideas bound up with making things better; from self-improvement to making the environment, society, or even The World a better place. This aspiration seems embodied across cultures. It rests on an approach that regards us as the authors of our own destiny. Whether through religious, political, economic or spiritual betterment, it seems everyone wants to make things better. This can be observed to have had mixed success. Things can go wrong.
The small drawings present vehicles, ladders and weather as images that manifest journeys in the theatre of improvement. There are boats without waterways, planes without hope, and stranded submarines filling up with rain. Many are uncomfortably large and overfill the available picture space. The drawings stand alone as individual snapshots, and form mini worlds when seen in groups. All together they form a sequence. Like a photo album of a pantomime pilgrimage, that invites us to once again laugh - this time at our collective endeavour to seek virtue and escape vice.
Nina Edge trained as a ceramicist and became known for subversive use of craft processes in shows with Black British artists in the 1980s. She is published by Third Text, International Journal of Art & Design Education, Feminist Art News, Liverpool University Press, Root Ed Zine and the British Council.
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) and Women In Revolt (Tate Britain 2023, National Galleries Scotland 2024, The Whitworth 2025)
Edge regards art as something that can be encountered anywhere which has lead to window drawings, advertising hoardings and live street works notably ‘Sold Down the River’ (Bluecoat Liverpool, 1995) and ‘Habeas Corpus’ (Liverpool, 2007 & London 2017) The live performative work on originated from work as a carnival designer in Notting Hill and Cardiff Docks. The Cardiff docks community supported Edge’s early work and now host a public artwork ‘West Close Garden’ generated with local teenagers and makers. Her collaborative public artwork continued with sculptures on The Irwell Sculpture Trail in Salford, and in Oldham and Birmingham.
Many of the works shown in galleries are textile works including mechanical and hand embroidery, batik, and appliqué pieces all polemic in nature. Edge continues to use lowly materials to create debate around power, value and ethics.
Her practice is accessible and expansive. She has made longstanding collaborations with communities and such as the renown Welsh Streets Housing Campaign, and work around food production and horticulture.
Recent awards from the Arts Council DYCP fund and the DACS Art 360 Archive fund are enabling pre-digital era works to come to light such as those are currently showing with the Tate Britain tour of Women Inn Revolt, and touring from that show to Ruup and Form.
