This intimate relationship nurtured with her outdoor studio has been influential on Edie’s approach to teaching. The same way the land remembers, Edie sees her studio inside Swansea College of Art as holding and remembering all the interactions she has had with the students; the encounters, impromptu arrivals, unexpected conversations, students coming and going. Edie’s studio sat in what was once a former grammar school. Being based within this traditional classroom architecture drove her to seek out slippages in the institution where she could play with existing as both and neither student nor lecturer. Edie has explained her excitement in manoeuvring across the edges of the art school like this. The casual encounters in the studio, the chance moments of passing in the corridors and along the staircases are the ways she built meaningful connections with students.

Agitating typical student-teacher structures stimulated a constant exchange of learning – a cyclical gathering of ideas and giving new ones back. This is analogous with how Edie encourages interaction with the land. The fellowship inspired a new way of thinking about teaching; the land became a classroom as well as a studio. Deconstructing the formal classroom setting and resituating it amongst the landscape has been an important process for Edie. She was enthusiastic in teasing out new proximities between her students and the land. Edie invited students into a different way of participating with nature through being led instinctively and emotionally by the shifting conditions and climate of a place. She asked them to listen hard to the rhythms and cadence of nature in tandem with their own minds, as they found, sensed and returned their native clays and materials back to the land. Developing a shared language with her students like this enabled her to better support their unique needs whilst understanding her own neurodivergence. For Edie, the landscape is a teacher that prompts a vital relearning of how to exist by intuition as an artist. With its ferocious fecundity the land functions in a rebellious state. It produces when it needs to produce. It changes when it needs to change. It rushes from form to form in cycles of abundance and decay. Edie has learnt from the land to be unapologetically adaptable, always embracing the temperament of where she is and how she feels from day to day. Nature is a constant reminder of mutability. This urges more creative risks.

One of these risks has been the introduction of photography into her practice. The Welsh coastline presented an unfamiliar landscape. It is rocky, abrasive and constantly humming with the rapid changes wrought by erosion as it is hit repeatedly by the tide. It was harder to find workable natural clay in this environment and therefore Edie learnt to engage a different kind of tactility. Interfacing her camera lens closely with the landscape was untested but allowed her to gather moments in the same way she gathered materials. Her relationship to her surroundings was abundantly documented as a record of all the energetic shifts, causes and effects she, the land and her work went through together. Her post-production was just as energetic: Edie conceived an image, developed and then retouched it by reacting it physically with the earth. Submerging her photographic prints into watery clay permitted chance to take over. The outcomes are an improvised meeting of land and image. And this is an ongoing meeting as the image continues to be stained and dyed over time, seeping through and edited by the thick coagulants of clay. Edie untethers her images. She takes them further into a future even she can’t predict. This not knowing when or how nature will affect her image-making is exhilarating. Nature is stubborn. It ignores boundaries and expectations. Edie uses it as a medium that can articulate a moment in time outside of a fixed image’s own terms. It streams with the capabilities of endless beginnings.

Edie occupies an in/between space. The space between land and sea, Welsh and English, artist and teacher, past and future. These things are not two sides of a coin but that which she continues to bring into constant proximity. She is simultaneous. It is the land that emboldens her to be so. Edie does not know how the edges of these things will meet each time. And she’s okay with that. All she knows is that she will keep creating alongside the land to make room for it all.

Eleanor Sanghara is a Punjabi-British artist, educator and cultural producer whose practice explores anti-colonial perspectives of community-building, Britishness and the imaging of ‘glitched-mixed-bodies’ throughout history.