Spotlight Artist: Interview with Annie Edwards
We are excited to share with you our recent interview with an incredibly talented artist, Annie Edwards! We discuss the concepts, messages and meanings behind her work, influences, experience in the creative industry and upcoming exhibitions.
Q: Please could you give us a brief overview of what your work is about?
A: Brutally sensitive and delicately powerful, my essential area of focus is the human body. I am a multidisciplinary artist and lecturer, currently studying for an MA in Sculpture at the Royal College of Art. My work distorts a familiar sense of reality by incorporating the hyperreal with abstraction. Through sculpture, performance, and installation, I explore the human body from biological and neurochemical perspectives that shape the physical and psychological mechanics of my work. Primary research is informed by personal explorations of mental and physical health, which then evolves to extend outwards – creating live connections and dialogues with the audience. I am unafraid to employ a vast and symbolic range of materials, including atopic medicines, human skin, and hair. Having exhibited internationally, I was recently invited to show my work at Somerset House, London whereby I was asked to respond to the theme of unseen women’s work through performance.
Q: From what/where do you draw inspiration for your work?
A: My body has never been an easy place to inhabit. Shaped by chronic atopic conditions and domestic trauma, it’s been a site of love, pain, haze and conflict for as long as I can remember. My relationship with my body has been turbulent and constantly shifting. I’ve made it my life’s work to understand, reclaim, and ultimately learn to celebrate my body and its mechanisms as a site of research, enquiry and resolution. In exposing my own vulnerabilities, I hope to inspire others to do the same - to listen curiously and deeply to their bodies, to embrace their complexity, and to recognize the silent, nuanced and beautifully complex stories they carry.
Lately, I’ve come to realize that my fascination with kinetic sculpture and puppetry isn’t new - it’s something that has been quietly guiding me all along. These mediums, which teeter between autonomy and control, speak directly to the power dynamics I’ve been unpacking for years. Recently I remembered that my GCSE final piece featured a self-portrait manipulating miniature versions of my siblings like puppets. Years later, during my BA FMP, I created ventriloquist dummies using taxidermy and pigs’ heads. These works, though worlds apart in form, share the same conceptual root: the body as both subject and object, as something controlled, medicalized, mechanized, and grotesquely beautiful. There is a mechanical logic underpinning much of my work—whether it’s animatronics, wearable sculpture, or the automated gestures of performance. I’m fascinated by the reliance we have on machines, especially in medical contexts. This ties into broader ideas around the medicalized female body and its vulnerability under biased, unequal clinical scrutiny. That thread of the body as a system within systems continues to pull through everything I make.
I grew up on a working farm, surrounded by the full, unfiltered cycle of life and death. From rearing animals to witnessing their slaughtering for meat, the process was never hidden from me—it was graphic, visceral, and an integral part of farming life. My parents were passionate advocates for organic farming, deeply committed to health, sustainability, and respect for the land and the animals we raised. This knowledge of how farming should be has later inspired parallels between the commodification of livestock and the ways female bodies are consumed, scrutinised, and stripped of agency. That early exposure shaped the way I now think about power, flesh, and care—both in my feminist politics and my art practice.
Food, too, was central to our family life. We were keen cooks and bakers, and meals were a ritual of love and creativity. Due to my severe allergies as a child, I often had to exist in proximity to food without being able to participate and indulge in it. I learned what it meant to watch others eat and enjoy things that, for me, were harmful and dangerous to consume. I learned the feeling of being close but excluded. To look but not to touch. That sense of longing and separation. I’m interested in how food can very quickly turn from being highly appetizing to grossly off-putting. The abject is a critical lens within the work, particularly in the context of sexual politics and the female body. Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat and Korsmeyer’s writings on aesthetics and the foul have helped me consider how women, like animals, are often reduced to flesh: consumed, idealized, and regulated. I grew up around organic farming, and that background sharpened my awareness of how mass production and commodification shape not only food systems but bodies and identities.
I’m heavily influenced by psychoanalysis, especially theories around trauma and embodiment. The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van Der Kolk and Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross have been pivotal in helping me understand how the brain and body operate under duress—how the residue of experience lives within us somatically. This manifests in my performance work and in my use of materials like atopic medicines, human hair, and skin: the substances that sit closest to the body, often dismissed or pathologized, but rich in narrative potential. I see the skin as a map that tells stories where language fails.
I’m always reaching for a balance between humour and sadness, intimacy and revulsion. I like to build tension between attraction and discomfort - crafting work that invites a tactile curiosity but resists easy consumption. I’m trying to make sense of the messy, layered reality of living in a body.
Q: Is there an artist who has been particularly inspirational as you’ve developed your craft over time?
A: My research is informed by artists who push the boundaries of contemporary sculpture and animation. Sculptors such as Sidsel Meineche Hansen engage with the commodification of the body and digital labour, while Isabelle Frances McGuire explores eerie, doll-like forms that question personhood and automation. Hannah Levy and Hugo Guerin work within a raw, bodily, and industrial aesthetic, emphasizing the materiality of sculptural forms by integrating rigid, metallic structures with biomorphic, human/animal flesh-like textures that merge clinical and bodily aesthetics. In animation, Jakob Grosse- Ophoff and Tobias Bradford create unsettling, mechanized figures that evoke themes of dissociation and control, reflecting similar concerns in my work. Nathaniel Mellors, Jordan Wolfson, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu are also huge influences within animatronics.
Humour in my work functions as both a disarming and subversive tool, allowing me to address complex and often uncomfortable themes through irony, exaggeration, and material play. Inspired by Dom Watson’s surreal compositions and Anthea Hamilton’s absurdist sensibilities, I use unexpected juxtapositions—such as oversized, fleshy textures on rigid, mechanical structures—to evoke both amusement and unease. This tension challenges the viewer’s emotional response, encouraging deeper engagement with themes of bodily perception, automation, and control.
In contrast to the passive body in classical sculpture, my work introduces movement, unpredictability, and technological interventions, subverting expectations of bodily autonomy. By integrating sensors and programmed responses, I create sculptures that oscillate between submission and resistance, unsettling the boundary between control and self-determination. By synthesizing conceptual and technical approaches through the merging of digital and physical sculptural processes, I position my practice within contemporary discourse, challenging traditional understandings of bodily representation.
My work critically engages with contemporary feminist discourse by interrogating the increasing automation and commodification of the body, particularly in relation to medicalization, the meat industry, and bodily autonomy. These concepts are largely inspired by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto.
Q: Are there any messages you hope to put across to viewers through your pieces?
A: The message I put across to the viewer extends as an invitation to draw closer to the full spectrum of human experience - especially the parts we are conditioned to reject and shy away from. We live in a culture that sanitizes, aestheticizes, or ignores the realities of living in a body, particularly one that is a minority, female, messy or imperfect. I want viewers to confront discomfort, to feel it curiously in their own bodies, and to ask with love and care, why rawness and vulnerability are such difficult phenomena to experience.
A major focus of my work is the complexity of trauma—not just as something psychological, but as something that’s held in the body, in the skin, in the nervous system. I often use visceral materials like human hair, atopic medicines, and prosthetics to make that inner reality visible. I’m interested in how art can communicate what words can’t, how texture, form, and even sound can trace the silence of pain or the residue of memory. The message I want to put across is generally an educational one. Trauma is a misunderstood and incorrectly represented condition within the media and society.
Feminism is central to my practice, particularly when thinking about the ways women’s bodies are objectified, medicalized, and commodified—treated as things to be fixed, consumed, or regulated. I often reference these ideas through an animal lens. It’s telling how quickly people can feel empathy for animals in distress, yet hesitate to confront the realities of human suffering—especially when that suffering is bound up with gender, sexuality, or illness. By collapsing the boundaries between the human and the animal, the beautiful and the grotesque, I aim to disrupt that detachment and provoke a deeper, more embodied response.
I don’t believe in offering clean answers or comfortable experiences. I’m far more interested in creating work that lingers, that asks viewers to reckon with their own vulnerability—and to find, within that rawness, a point of connection to themselves or each other.
Q:What has been your biggest challenge as you develop your career as an artist and how have you overcome it?
A: One of the biggest challenges I’ve faced in developing my career as an artist has been navigating the intersecting pressures of time, money and bias against the arts as a viable and worth-while career. I felt the implicit pressure to be practical, employable and to choose a safer path which meant spending many years focusing on career and earning money rather than being an artist. Like many artists, I’ve had to juggle multiple jobs, find odd moments to make work, and constantly question whether what I’m doing is valid or valuable. But what’s made these challenges manageable is how deeply my practice is connected to my body and emotional experiences. Working through trauma isn’t just part of the content, it’s embedded in the making which is intrinsically and naturally therapeutic. Art has always been my way through. My language, my freedom and my peace.
Making art isn’t a luxury - it is essential. I have always known this, and so I had to make it my absolute goal to work within the creative industry in some capacity. This is how I got into teaching. Teaching has been both a gift and a challenge. It’s rewarding, invigorating, and symbiotically enriches the work I make as an artist. But balancing teaching with maintaining a serious, embodied, time/money-hungry practice is incredibly difficult—especially within the UK’s current education climate. Art and design are consistently devalued, seen as non-essential, non-academic, or indulgent. The college sector in particular is chronically underfunded and under-resourced. I feel I have worked extremely hard to develop a meaningful, well-respected career that ultimately pays very poorly, meaning I need to work more hours to make ends meet, which ultimately takes time away from my creative practice. I often feel pulled in opposite directions, trying to nourish others creatively while barely scraping enough time or energy to feed my own practice.
But over time, I realised that not making work was more painful than risking failure or loss of income. Art isn’t just a career for me—it’s a survival mechanism, a way of processing the world and my place within it. It’s how I digest trauma, reconnect with my body, and push against systems that try to shrink or silence me. I’ve had to rewire my thinking and fight for my time, my space, and my right to make. Studying at the RCA and taking part in artist residencies like Joya:Air in Spain have been instrumental in this shift—they’ve helped me build a scaffold of confidence and community that reminds me of where I belong.
The most pivotal aspect to overcoming challenges has been a deepening of my own art and psychological education and the subsequent support networks that learning has facilitated. I’ve found healing and solidarity in both personal and professional communities. The Royal College Art has given me the time and space to explore my practice on a professional level, while the Joya:Air residency in Spain offered a period of invaluable freedom and reflection that was vital to regaining perspective. I’m also grateful for the support of charities like SARSAS, which helped me develop an intellectual and embodied understanding of art and trauma. My friends and family have shaped my understanding of resilience, and how making is a shared act of survival and celebration of existence.
Q: Is there any advice you would give to someone looking to start a career in the creative industry?
A: The best advice I can give to someone starting out in the creative industry is: make time for your work, however and wherever you can. You don’t need expensive materials or a formal education to be an artist—what matters most is carving out space and time, however small, to nurture your ideas and let them grow.
I am an advocate of education, and doing a foundation and a master’s degree were two of the most influential and invigorating experiences of my life. If further education is an option, it can be a powerful way to focus and develop a professional practice that is unique to you. I see it as a gift. Educational establishments have armed me with very powerful qualities. They have revealed who I am as a maker, taught me the value of having a studio and how to use it properly, the value of lifelong learning and most importantly, how invaluable it is to be a part of a lively creative network. But it’s not the only path! Some of the most insightful, radical artists I know never went to art school. What matters is learning how to put systems in place that support and nourish your creativity in a way that fits your life. Being a part of a creative community in some way doesn’t just depend on education either.
If you're working a job to support yourself, try - if possible - to find one that feeds you rather than drains you. It might not be your dream role, but maybe it offers flexible hours, time to think, or connects with your subject matter in unexpected ways. I’ve always found it useful to let life and work bleed into each other—the everyday is a huge part of my practice.
Studio space can be expensive and inaccessible—but creativity doesn’t require a pristine white cube. I’ve made work in bedrooms, bathrooms, parks, on stairs, in kitchens. If you can, try joining a shared space or local collective, even informally. Community is vital. Having just one or two people to share ideas, materials, or encouragement with can completely change your energy. If a physical studio isn’t an option, maybe it’s a WhatsApp group, an email thread, or a monthly meet-up in a public space—whatever feeds you and reminds you that you’re not doing this alone.
One key professional habit I’d recommend is photographing your work, especially at key milestones in its development. Even if you don’t have access to a ‘white cube’ space or professional space, it’s important to document your pieces in a clean, neutral environment. It shows that you value your work, makes it easier for gallerists and curators to envision it in their own spaces, and keeps a good record of your development. Plus, it allows you to reflect on your work more critically and professionally over time. These photographs are a tool for both reflection and future opportunity—an investment in how you present your practice to the world.
Mostly, I’d say: listen to your work, trust and be confident in the strange and outlandish ideas, and find ways to show up for the work. You don’t need permission. You just need persistence, playfulness, and an encouraging voice – a voice that you can find around you and most importantly within you.
Q: Please tell us about any upcoming shows/exhibitions which you would like us to promote in our Newsletter.
A: I’m so very excited and delighted to be part of two upcoming exhibitions that speak to the heart of my current practice:
1, 2, 3, Alt!
📍 Hypha Gallery, Marble Arch
🗓️ 24th April – 24th May 2025
🎉 Private View: 1st May
Curated by @serena_xrgao and organised by @hyphastudios
The sculpture speaks: “I am fragmented, in flux and in conversation with you. I am disassembled and reassembled to your liking. I exist unrecognized unless confronted and intentionally engaged with. I am expensive. Not to be touched even though I so desperately want you to touch me. I am unsettling yet magnetic. I am both a barrier and an invitation, drawing you into my tension of concealment and revelation. I am sculptural, technological echoes of flesh and form, shaped by the experiences that inhabit me and inhabit you. I embody your complexity of being—where identity is layered, fractured, assembled, disassembled and ever-evolving.”
And of course, I’m gearing up for the final degree show at the RCA:
RCA 2025 Graduate Show
📍 RCA Battersea Studio Building
🗓️ 19th – 21st June 2025
This will be the culmination of my time on the MA Sculpture programme—a chance to share the most ambitious iteration of my practice yet.
For up-to-date info and behind-the-scenes process, follow me on Instagram: @a_knee___