Joya: guest curator / Royal College of Art (group residency) / Annie Edwards
photo Simon Beckmann
Joya: guest curator / Royal College of Art (group residency) / Annie Edwards
Annie Edwards' essential area of focus is the human body. Annie's multidisciplinary practice distorts our familiar sense of reality by incorporating robotic, figurative sculptures with abstracted skeletal forms. Her installation and performances aim to understand the body from biological, psychoanalytical and social perspectives. Annie's research choreographs the tension between body and machine, embedding visceral knowledge into mechanical gesture. Her work references wider systems of control present in domestic, medical and industrial environments, drawing on her personal experience of trauma, neurodiversity, atopic illness, and her background in farming.
Through processes of building, dissembling, and rebuilding, Annie’s fragmented forms evoke the containment and expression of trauma within the brain and body. Drawing from abattoir architecture and her rural upbringing, she creates visceral metaphors of consumption, where bodies are reduced to objects within a system. Annie uses humour as both a disarming and subversive tool, addressing the parts of the body we are conditioned to shy away from.
Her work embraces the grotesque and the abject as strategies to confront the beauty and discomfort of embodiment—using the language of the body to expose what is usually hidden, repressed, or deemed unacceptable. Annie’s work asks the viewer to reckon with their own embodiment, their own complicity, and their own capacity for tenderness.
Annie Edwards has exhibited widely across the UK and internationally, with current participation in Bow Arts’ international performance and moving image biennial Visions in the Nunnery (2025), curated by Rosie Gibbens. Other recent exhibitions include 1,2,3 Alt at Hypha, Marble Arch (2025), All Mouth No Trousers at Three Rooms, Wandsworth (2025), and Blooming on Paper at Somerset House (2025).
In partnership with the Royal College of Art, this group residency at Joya: AiR was curated by guest artist Annie Edwards (GBA 26, MA RCA, BFA) www.annieedwards.com
