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.

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Their Warning Lights mural, installed for the 2025 Art Walk Porty Festival, takes the beacon symbol as an indicator of warning as well as celebration, whilst designating the Shore Hunt growing space; evoking a space to gather, a space for creativity, hope and celebration, but also of criticality and caution.

The planting of oyster leaf plants (mertensia martima) builds on local and global urgency around marine health, of the value nature based solutions bring to stabilizing our shores, and to the role oyster bed restoration has for coastal protection and boosting biodiversity.

The Shore Hunt space provides a space to gather and to make connections shore to shore. In coming months the space will serve as a growing lab hosting a series of coastal ecology talks, workshops and creative interventions.

Visitors are very welcome to add their own native coastal plants to this developing shore space, cultivating this piece of urban scrubland.

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Connecting three tidal wetland saltmarshes

Artists: Linde Ex (Groningen, Netherlands), Dana Olărescu (Barrow-in-Furness & London, England), Oscar Van Heek (Edinburgh, Scotland)

Deluge is a collaboration between three artists and three saltmarsh habitats (UK/Netherlands) exploring tidal wetland ecosystems across the sites of Aberlady, East Lothian, Scotland; Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, England; Schiermonikoog, The Wadden Sea, Netherlands. 

First begun in 2022, commencing with a relay-style travelling residency the three artists took turns to visit and spend time in each of the saltmarshes, through which a series of events has since developed and been produced, culminating with an exhibition in 2025 hosted in Barrow-in-Furness created in partnership with Art Gene. 

Deluge takes its name from a landscape constantly under the threat of water, being flooded twice a day by salt or brackish water; a habitat that helps to protect our shorelines from erosion and slows down flooding. 

This three-year project seeks to embrace the ecological value of these rare, often overlooked habitats with each artist creating works in response.

Each artist tells a story of their different engagements with these fragile landscapes and their communities, of their journeys between each locality crossing land, coast and sea, and of their different methods of enquiry.

In this exhibition at Art Gene the saltmarsh is considered as a wasteland, a space historically without use; a landscape initially underwhelming in its features, in which human presence has been largely absent and reimagined into a realm of shapes, speculation, and imagination; or, a land required to continually adapt to provide shelter, emblematic of our resilience at a time of increasing climate change. 

Collectively the exhibition considers how to value, engage with and take care of these precious landscapes, largely forgotten and unnoticed, yet vital transitional zones between land and sea.

Deluge was initiated by curator Rosy Naylor, Art Walk Projects (Edinburgh), and created in partnership with Art Gene (Barrow-in-Furness) and curator Anna-Rosja Haveman (Art & Environment, University of Groningen, Netherlands). 

About the artists

Linde Ex (b. 1983, Nijmegen, The Netherlands) is a visual artist, artistic researcher and teacher. She works as an artistic PhD candidate at the University of Groningen and the Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen, the Netherlands. She is also a core lecturer at the Fine Art and Design Master MAPs (Materials in Artistic Practices) Frank Mohr Institute, Groningen.

Linde is drawn to topics that whisper and murmur. Entities like flying insects, saltmarshes, peat and bristle worms. Entities that tend to be neglected by humans or have an understated beauty. Her artistic research consists of attempts to relate and interact with these others. This results in a variety of collaborations (with natural scientists, farmers, sorcerers, dancers, insects, etc.) and outcomes. Linde makes installations, drawings, books and videos.

In her artistic PhD, Linde develops distinct artistic ways to connect the research to broader environmental processes and challenges. She published articles in the international journals Journal of Artistic Research (JAR) and Forum+. Linde was awarded the George Verberg Grant (2020) and the Noordenaars Young Talent Artist in Space Grant (2021). Her work has been showcased in leading arts institutions and platforms.

Dana Olărescu (b. 1985, România) is a London-based socially engaged artist working at the intersection of installation, performance, and social design, whose practice challenges minority exclusion and environmental injustice. Through participatory methodologies that democratise access to art and knowledge, she aims to give under-served migrant groups and people habitually excluded from decision-making processes the agency to become active co-producers of culture. 

Her work has been showcased by leading arts institutions and platforms, including Tate Modern, the London Short Film Festival, the National Maritime Museum, the Low Carbon Design Institute, Art Gene, ArtHouse Jersey, x-church, in-situ, Pier Projects, Incheon Art Platform (South Korea), and Tanzhaus NRW (Germany).

Oscar Van Heek (b. 1965, Weesp, The Netherlands) is an Edinburgh based fine art photographer, film maker and writer. He has written and directed the film Dark Water a unique experimental collaboration with Scottish Opera and composer Malcolm Lindsay, exploring new ways to create narrative structure. Dark Water opened at Palm Springs festival.

This was followed by The Iron Harvest, a video installation and series of fine art prints, detailing the detonation of live world war one ammunition on the former battle grounds of Ypres. It was nominated for the Scottish Landscape Awards and shown at the Edinburgh City Art Centre 2024; at Sonica Glasgow 2022 and Somerset House in London and nominated for the Sony world Photography awards 2020.

In 2023 Oscar had a major exhibition at the Scottish Poetry Library entitled –Waterfalls – a unique collaboration with authors and poets, including; Kathleen Jamie; Jen Hadfield and Cal Flyn.  Current work includes The Wastelands and Color Flora.

Oscar regularly shows at Royal Scottish Academy’s Annual Exhibition.

Artist Dana Olarescu leading walking workshop at Aberlady Saltmarsh (2023), with contributions from Helena Simmons (Green Shores)

Artist Camille Aboudaram leading walking workshop session around billboard sites of Portobello 2023 (in association with Dana Olarescu)

Curator Anna-Rosja Haveman (University of Groningen) talk at Art Walk Hub 2023

Artist Linde Ex leading walkshop at Aberlady Nature Reserve (January 2025)

Drawing workshop with Linde Ex (January 2025)

2025 Events & Exhibition

DELUGE – Exhibition at Art Gene, Barrow-in-Furness
Artists: Linde Ex, Dana Olarescu, Oscar Van Heek
with writing commissioned from Tom Jeffreys – Read Here
Fri 28 February to Fri 28 March 2025, Opening: Thu 27 February 6.30-9pm

DELUGE – A conversation and community conference
that concludes two years of research and work focused around the Deluge project, featuring a series of conversations and presentations from artists, ecologists and salt marsh experts
Fri 28 February 2025, 1-5pm at Art Gene, Barrow-in-Furness

REVIEW Corridor8: written by Simon Sylvester – Read Here

DELUGE is supported by funding from Creative Scotland.

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Made from woven willow and bamboo and lined with clothing donated by local residents, the vessel evokes the possibility of navigating hope in uncertain times. The work encourages conversations around the climate emergency and Portobello’s complex connections with the sea. Following a series of workshops, in which participants can create a common ‘survival kit’, the project culminates with a watery celebration event, launching the vessel with a swim along the shore.

Top image: Coracle Launch (2023) – Photo: Jon Davey

Coracle Launch & Watery Event at Portobello Beach (September 2023)- Photos: Ellie J McMaster
Videography: Rachel McBrinn

Jenny Pope is a sculptor who creates collections of tools from discarded objects to explore psychological change. Her work layers together different components, each with their own past functions and applications, in order to create non-linear narratives and evoke the intangible ways in which we make decisions in response to change and uncertainty. In particular, her work explores anxieties around the climate crisis, questioning the possibilities of hope and perceptions of survival.

She trained at Edinburgh College of Art and exhibits widely in the UK. She has undertaken residencies with Art Walk Porty and commissions with Scottish Society of Artists (SSA). She is also on the council of the SSA, a member of Royal British Society of Sculptors, and is involved in mentoring and coaching artists.

Installation at mote102 (Art Walk Extended, September 2023)- Photo: Sally Jubb

LIST OF WORKS

August 2023 Survival Kit Workshops, Portobello
September 2023 during Art Walk Porty:
VESSEL Group Exhibition, Art Walk Hub Portobello
VESSEL Group Exhibition, mote102 Ferry Rd Leith
Coracle Launch and Watery Event, Portobello Beach

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Joanne Matthews (centre) with other SALT residency artists, Mahala Le May (left), Natasha Thembiso Ruwona (right)
Image: Ellie J McMaster

Commissioned Works:

Exhibition
Assorted Kipple Art Walk Hub 2022 and site of Old Joppa Saltpans (alongside performance/reading) – photographed below

at first, and then 15:00 video and sound installation, mote102 102 Ferry Road Edinburgh March 2023

Set in a speculative salty world, at first, and then is a collage of photographs, moving image and sound. Part of Matthews’ 2022 residency with Art Walk Projects, the film takes place in an over-salinated Portobello. Through a queer lens and with nods to 1960s French new wave cinema, the work layers a 35-voice choir with crawling digital sounds, harking to past science fictions projecting into the future. Production and editing assistance from Kathryn Cutler-Mackenzie.

Writing commissioned in partnership with MAP Magazine, published in SALT journal published by Art Walk Press 2023:

We Will All Be Marine Mammals Soon on Joanne Matthews by Rowan Lear – available to read on MAP

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Artist/curator Rosy Naylor invited five artists to come together and share dialogue around their walking habitats at a time when there were geographical limits upon the distances one could walk. Together a project slowly emerged with consideration and care around each of the five habitats and their commonality. 

Each artist collected the same amount of water from their local sea or river which was then boiled off at Ascus Lab to create salt, with varying colours and quantities resulting; from pure white to polluted brown. 

In 2022 the five artists came together for the first time, leading an in-person walk at Portobello Beach; each artist taking it in turn to pair a section of the walk with their own location. An exhibition at the Art Walk Festival Hub also showed the waters, salts and accompanying site-responsive artworks created by each artist.

About the artists

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