Latest collaboration: Maya was shortlisted for the 2024 Emergent bursary with BALTIC and Shape Arts.

Artist statement: Maya Rose Edwards is a participatory public sculptor. They have worked in participatory settings for five years, creating ambitious public interventions with communities and their landscapes. In 2023, completing the Mount Stuart Artists Residency, their project TWOFOLD explored the connection between queer and rural identities on the Isle of Bute, resulting in a series of permanent, site-specific works. They are currently undertaking a 14-month placemaking commission along Stranraer's abandoned waterfront, co-designing an ecological-focused future landmark with communities along a post-industrial coastline. They are the recipient of the RSA New Contemporaries Selection 2023 for which they received the Chalmers Award, Creative Scotland Youth Arts Bursary 2022, Steven Palmer Travel Bursary 2023, and have just installed an interactive public artwork as part of the 13th edition of Sculpture in the City, supported by the City of London.

FOLD 2023, Mount Stuart Emerging Artists Residency, Isle of Bute. Description: Composite of four photographs in a grid formation, each an aerial shot of a field in which sheep have been formed into letters, spelling out FOLD across all four images.

Maya works across conceptual sculpture, public space, and participatory practice, punctuating landscapes with encounters and poetics to inspire second thoughts and acts of resistance. They works are informed by placemaking, people-object relations, and speculative futures. Maya works site specifically with hunter-gatherer tactics to compose new narratives of seemingly familiar spaces through forms of intervention, text, and sculpture.

Check out Maya's website Follow them on Instagram

Kissing Gate 2024, Sculpture in the City 13th Edition, London. Description: photograph of a wooden kissing gate sat atop a wide, low plinth installed in an urban street environment. A car passes by on the road behind the artwork.

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Banner image: The end of the line/The turn of the tide 2024, Stranraer. Description: A photograph of two sailing boats - one resembling a catamaran, the other a more traditional boat build. They sail one behind the other at sea, with the sails raised. On one sail, the left boat's, text reading 'The end of the line' is written in bold, capitalised black font. In the same manner, on the second sail, text reads 'The turn of the tide.'