NEW Outer Spaces Scotland Award - RSA New Contemporaries 2025

Anna Charlotta Gardiner selected for new Outer Spaces Scotland Award

We are delighted to announce that Finnish-Scottish mixed-media visual and performance artist Anna Charlotta Gardiner has been selected for the Outer Spaces Scotland Award - RSA New Contemporaries.

Continuing our partnership with the Royal Scottish Academy, following the first Outer Spaces Scotland RSA Award in 2024, Gardiner was selected from the RSA New Contemporaries 2025 exhibition. The artist has been awarded a large-scale studio space for 1+ months, together with £500 bursary.

Gardiner was born in Finland and has lived in Orkney for over ten years. She is a multi-disciplinary mixed-media visual and performance artist who unearths the space between myth and science, between heritage and dreams, dwelling in poetic tangles that commune with the natural world. Her practice is a form of applied animism and ritual play—an intimate, sustainable engagement with materials and processes. In addition to making costumes of imagined gods for site-specific performance and installation works, Anna also makes 2D and 3D collages using a variety of materials, from magazines to dog hair, from textiles to bone.

On display as part of the RSA New Contemporaries 2025 exhibition, Gardiner's installation features three beings, Man Emo, Ilman Emo and Veden Emo, 'mothers' of the earth, air and water, embedding concepts from Finnish mythology in the landscapes of Orkney.

The artists says 'I am thrilled to have received the Outer Spaces Award and look forward to working with an organisation whose values align so closely with mine. The dedicated time and generous space to make larger and more experimental work will allow me to immerse myself in new ways of occupying space. I hope to use this opportunity to explore neurotransgressive performance and world-making.'.

Gardiner will take a up her Outer Spaces studio in Aberdeen this winter. We look forward to seeing how she uses the large scale space to explore her practice.

RSA New Contemporaries 2025

22th March - 16th April 2025

RSA New Contemporaries represents the Royal Scottish Academy's commitment to supporting and promoting emerging artists and architects in Scotland.

Find out more here.