News July 2025
EAF25 x Outer Spaces transform city centre space into hub of artist’s activity
In August 2025, Outer Spaces will partner with EAF25 (Edinburgh Art Festival) to transform a disused commercial space in Edinburgh’s City Centre into a space for a community of artists to create, collaborate and exchange ideas.
Artists across Scotland are using spaces offered by Outer Spaces to experiment and create new work, building a community of artists that reaches across the country. This August, some of this vital work will be made publicly available through a brand new partnership with EAF, who are committed to supporting Edinburgh’s arts ecology both in August and throughout the year.
This Summer, Outer Spaces venue at 45 Leith Street will be the EAF Pavilion, a space where communities can gather to explore art from 7 - 24 August 2025.
Within this space, two strands of activity will be taking place throughout the festival and beyond. HOST will support four artists-in-residence in partnership with EAF25 on the building's ground floor, while The Cube Studio Programme (TCSP) across the fifth floor supports 10 artists at various career stages, forming a unique peer group and a cross-section of the Outer Spaces member network. TCSP invites audiences to discover the research and practices of these artists, living and working in Edinburgh, selected from our growing community of over 1000 artists across the Outer Spaces nationwide network.
HOST is a brand-new artist residency programme, co-presented by Outer Spaces and EAF25, designed as a platform for early-career artists to connect them with Edinburgh’s creative communities both during and beyond the festival moment. Over six months, the residency will offer artists time, resources and a studio in the heart of the city - a space for experimentation, connection and visibility.
HOST brings together members of the Outer Spaces community with artists from the EAF25 programme: Hamish Halley, EAF’s first Early CareerArtist-in-Residence
Jj Fadaka and Ria Andrews, EAF Civic Artists-in-Residence; and Outer Spaces studio holders Miriam Foy, Frances Burnett-Stuart and Olivia Priya Foster. HOST is also supported by the Hugo Burge Foundation, giving EAF’s Artists-in-Residence time and space to work in their beautiful Scottish Borders campus.
Visitors are welcome to explore the HOST artists’ practices through Open Studios every Saturday during EAF25.
“Outer Spaces continues to hand over spaces for artists to work in and collaborate in and make communities with other artists. Occupying these vacant commercial buildings temporarily is creating new opportunities for programming and providing support for artists across Scotland through commissioning and exhibition opportunities.
We are thrilled that this August, our building on Leith Street will be transformed by our new partnership with EAF25, and that the special dynamics of ‘meanwhile’ space and sites where art is made as well as presented will come together. In this building, less than 100 metres from the official centre of Edinburgh, HOST, a new residency programme will provide a much-needed opportunity without financial barriers for early career artists, alongside EAF25’s ambitious and engaging programme.” - Shân Edwards, Director, Outer Spaces
The Cube Studio Programme (TCSP) brings together ten artists living and working in Edinburgh from the Outer Spaces network to employ an experimental approach to building community and collaboration within a studio setting. The artists will drive the form of activity and interaction during their four-month residence of the space, which commenced in May 2025, with support from the team at Outer Spaces. This programme will culminate with participation in EAF25, adding a public dimension to this evolving project led by studio holders.
The ten artists featured in TCSP are: Hattie Quigley, Jillian Lee Adamson, Keziah MacNeill, Pandora Vaughan, Gosia Walton, Jj Fadaka, Remi Jablecki, Geri Loup Nolan, Hannah Lehtinen and Andrew McNiven. Across their diverse practices, shared concerns and connections include working with found, waste and recycled materials; architecture; ecological concerns; health and care; and the gendered body.
During August, three guided studio tours of The Cube Studio Programme will be led by Outer Spaces Head of Programme Tiffany Boyle. During each tour, selected artists will be present in their studio, their practices collectively spanning painting, installation, moving image, photography, textiles and poetry – tickets for these will shortly be bookable online.
Artists Jj Fadaka, Andrew McNiven and Pandora Vaughan's practices reflect upon the past, as a means to question issues of our present and future. Writer, facilitator and visual artist Jj Fadaka works in paint and textiles – alongside hosting workshops – focused on issues of marginalisation and practising for liberated futures. McNiven responds to the photographic pioneers Hill and Adamson, his studio at The Cube in virtually the same location as the 1840s studio. Working in moving image, his work explores fugitive light and enlightenment, in a time of increasing darkness. Working across a range of media including textiles, drawing and video, Vaughan’s practice interrogates architecture and space, looking at the boundaries and barriers between public, state and private control. She is currently working on new projects navigating across time and cities through invented machines and transposing architecture elements.
Vaughn’s interest in working with textiles is shared with fellow studio holder Jillian Lee Adamson, whose studio walls at The Cube are filled with expansive thread crochet works. Their forms take on cell-like forms, thoughtfully asking us to think about resilience and adaptability, safety and stability and self-care through slow stitching.
The practices of both Hanna Lehtinen and Keziah MacNeill’s encourages viewers to consider daily materials and experiences anew. Lehtinen’s interdisciplinary practice often departs from collecting and collections in the conceptualisation of new work, exploring the threshold between visibility and invisibility in our daily lives. Making with found objects and waste material – currently experimenting with textile offcuts – her practice investigates the human relationship with the natural world, and the interrelationships between objects and space. MacNeill’s current project looks to imaginative scenarios in which society finds opportunities to retrain our moral compasses. Working across narration, construction and DIY analogue photographic techniques, her project draws on the work of philosopher Kate Soper, and focuses on public clocks as devices that could act as meeting points, hosting moments of exchange and inviting us to learn from others.
Health, care, nature, and the body as understood within society are concerns shared across the practices of Remi Jablecki, Hattie Quigley, Gosia Walton and Geri Loup Nolan. Recent graduate Hattie Quigley works across painting and installation, extending her exploration of the ties between femininity, food and female desire, posing pertinent questions around contemporary society’s relationship with eating.
Jablecki draws upon his Polish heritage and cultural practices of gardening, creating large-scale oil paintings, sculpture and installation which explore themes of growth, labour, queerness, and belonging. Recently working in fragments of bark and trees, Walton’s practice is informed by living with long Covid, exploring the female body, mental health and nature though drawing, painting and printmaking. Loup Nolan’s work spans painting, assemblage and site-specific installations, heavily informed by previous residencies and periods of travel. Collaborating with the natural world and working with found fragments, the artists’ work is frequently exposed to the elements incorporating localised natural pigment, environmental structures, forms and textures.
Outer Spaces experimental model looks back to precedents such as the Artist Placement Group, founded by Barbara Steveni and John Latham in 1966, which placed artists in governmental, commercial and industrial contexts. Outer Spaces’ model is equally current, responding to the changing face of our cities post-pandemic, and forward-facing, as we imagine alternative artist-centred infrastructure for the visual arts.
Outer Spaces is committed to building a new infrastructure for arts in Scotland, and has supported over 900 artists in 120 properties across 13 local authorities. Since 2021, they have harnessed unused commercial spaces for public good by removing financial barriers to visual artists looking for access to space for research and experimentation, encouraging collaboration and cultural renewal in our arts sector.
Registered Scottish Charity No: SC051153
Registered Address: Artists’ Spaces SCIO
15 Calton Road, Edinburgh, EH8 8DL
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