The Held Sea situates the seaside resort as a site for remedy and repair. We imagine taking care as a social, cultural and political experience that brings together collective care within communities (for each other, for the vulnerable, for the environments in which we live).
This new round of residencies will investigate care through an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas that seeks to improve the health of place through times of uncertainty for coastal communities. Lived experience of care work and chronic illness underpins the programme with artists considering environmental care through the lens of illness and notions of the curable. How do we care for our fragile coastal futures, to address challenges for coastal communities? Through a process of slow care, of tending to, each artist will respond to the locality of Edinburgh’s coast, focussed on areas around Portobello & Seafield.
The programme will provide valuable, supported slow time for four artists to develop work within. Each artist’s project will consist of a research-based process, furthering their practice developed across the duration of the residency, whilst involving a participatory or collaborative element engaging local communities.
Project outcomes will centre around our new FORECAST environmental arts festival (May 2027) with a series of events introducing their projects taking place in autumn 2026.
About the artists:
KATHERINE FAY ALLAN (she/her) is a disabled interdisciplinary artist. Her practice grows from her lived experiences of illness to produce artworks that discuss the wider politics of societal and ecological health. With strong influences from science-fiction, and folkloric mythology, her artworks materialise within a distinctive visual language she calls ‘Future Folklore’. She has recently exhibited work at Collective Gallery, Edinburgh; LifeSpace Gallery, Dundee; with commissions at Hospitalfield, Arbroath.
SAOIRSE AMIRA ANIS (she/they) works across sculpture, performance, photography, film, writing and drawing with a practice that prioritises radical care, informality and empathy. Her work is informed by Black queer literature, her personal ancestry, and her own body as it moves through the world. Saoirse incorporates bodily knowledge and care into each facet of their work, considering the ways in which the body holds ancestral and lived memories. Recent work includes symphony for a fraying body at Dundee Contemporary Arts, breach of a fraying body for Art Night Dundee, and exhibitions at Cample Line, Edinburgh Art Festival and TULCA Festival of Visual Arts, Ireland.
JULIANA CAPES (she/her) is a multi disciplinary visual artist with a diverse practice working across sculptural and installation, sound and moving image, description and participation. Her artworks often use the vocabulary of natural phenomena to consider the processes of feeling, seeing and believing. Her poetic descriptive moving image work considers access as an instigating factor, building on her 20 years experience working with Visual Impaired audiences in Scotland as an Audio describer . She has recently shown work at Jupiter Artland, Sett studios, Hidden Door and CCA, Glasgow.
MAYA ROSE EDWARDS (they/them) combines research, collaboration and site responsive approaches in their practice to explore how landscapes carry histories, identities and shared cultural knowledge. They have developed a reputation for producing ambitious public artworks that focus on the politics of place, forgotten cultures and acts of landmarking through sculptural installation. Maya has shown work in the 13th & 14th edition of Sculpture in the City, London, was awarded the socially-engaged artist residency at Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute, recently completed an inaugural commission for Hay Castle with Meadow Arts, and is currently working on a three-year commission along Stranraer’s abandoned waterfront.
Supported with thanks to Creative Scotland’s Multi Year Fund.