Angela Edwards is a contemporary artist who is part of the Urban Life exhibition here at Kellie Miller Arts. Hear me talk about the exhibition and her work in this video here.

Angela’s central thesis is connected to a notion of ‘home’, a theme explored from many different perspectives and one she continually returns to. In this new body of work, she glimpses into the past by digital means to see a facsimile of the place in the 1940s that her mother called home, helping her to create a pastiche of that time.

“Having visited an area of London and videoed images, I wanted to see what the same area looked like when my mother was born there in the 1940s. Bermondsey in the east end of London was full of tenement buildings, housing large families in cramped conditions”.

Edwards new work is full of nostalgia for a bygone era and the work is set in the East End of London during the 1940s. She is fascinated by the idea of being given a virtual glimpse into a bygone era. From the dockworkers, of which her grandfather was one, to the tenement buildings with washing strung between them and kids playing in the streets. We can experience the era through a kind of digital time travel transferred into paint and charcoal.

Digital imagery transports the artist to places they will never experience in the flesh. The artist is then charged with the task of trying to convey this bizarre digital time warp that we find ourselves in. The digital era has meant that we experience many things, including conflict in war-torn countries, directly and, by the transient nature of the news and its 24-hour availability, we become de-sensitised and removed from it, as if it is some kind of virtual reality.

“We live in a world where there is more and more information and less and less meaning.”

― Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

Her works point to how digital photographs, through mobile phones, computers, and other devices, permeate our day-to-day lives. Digital images can be so transitory, but placed on the canvas we are given the time to consider them; the time that the digitalisation of the image (in video terms) denies us.

Angela Edwards has, over many years, developed her practice through life drawing, gaining a first-class honours degree in Fine Art Painting in 2014.

Angela is also part of the last exhibition of the year at Kellie Miller Arts, Small Wonders, starting November 23rd.