Turning around the corner onto a residential road in Archway, I lean forward into what can only be described as gale-force wind. Squinting through the debris that has accumulated in my eyes to create a misty film, I jump sharply to the left as a plastic plant pot hurtles down the street towards me. Noticing the sign for The Bomb Factory Art Foundation studios, I shoot off a quick message. ‘Here!’

 

Before long, I hear the clanging of metal doors and a blonde head appears beneath a hanging flower basket swinging violently in the turbulent air. ‘Come in out of the wind! Quick,’ she says, opening the gate for me. I’m ushered through a cavernous, light-filled hallway by artist Edie Flowers who, chattering away, pushes open the door to her studio without pausing for breath. As it closes behind us, I feel as though I’ve stepped into an alternate world.

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Demarcated by two half-walls that separate Edie’s working space from that of her two studiomates, every square inch of her studio is occupied by the very stuff of artmaking. Pliers and an open box of pastels sit next to a shortbread tin full of half-squeezed tubes of paint. Deconstructed chair legs and a broken radio are nestled on the floor next to a bright yellow hoover. Small clay sculptures sit in a row on a shelf above a dusky pink drawing of a mannequin and a horse head. In front, a papier-mâché bird hangs from the ceiling, while a pair of white plaster legs lie prostrate on a table to the side. 

 

As I set my cup of tea on the stool next to me, I twist my body to see paint brushes soaking in buckets behind the armchair that I’ve sunk into, the ends of my hair getting caught in stacked rolls of wire mesh in the process. There’s something compellingly timeless about it all, and I can’t help but think of the photographs I’ve seen of Giacometti’s studio. Perhaps it’s all the plaster figures?

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Edie watches my eyes dart around the studio. ‘I’m a bit of a hoarder,’ she says sheepishly. ‘I hate throwing stuff away. I’m a total magpie.’ She points to a group of delicate sculptures behind me. Marine-blue glass beads are threaded onto wires, which have been shaped by hand into looping ripples, before their ends have been embedded in blocks of plaster. ‘I’ve been reading this book called Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Have you read it?’

 

As it happens, I had finished Olga Tokarczuk’s murder-mystery-cum-feminist-fairy-tale only a few weeks earlier and was still reeling from the experience. ‘It’s so good,’ Edie exclaims. ‘I’m only halfway through but there’s this bit where the narrator is ranting about how, as humans, we’re all at the end of time. And she starts talking about magpies and how they’re drawn to beautiful things but to their own detriment. That they sometimes pick up cigarette butts and burn down not only their own nests but the houses they are built on.’

 

Brimming with enthusiasm, she turns to me. ‘And that’s exactly it. That’s how we’re all living now. This overconsumption, capitalist (sorry, the c-word!) thing.’ Inspired, she had the idea of making fifty of these glass bead sculptures. ‘So the overall piece is called Magpie Trap, and I want to have them all on plinths,’ she concludes.

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The materials for the sculptures come from Edie’s own magpie tendencies. After studying sculpture at Camberwell College, she attended The Royal Drawing School. There was a place, she tells me, where fellow students would leave materials they no longer needed. ‘I was walking past it one day and there was this MacBook box. I thought, there’s no chance someone is throwing away a computer,’ she says with a laugh, ‘and it was completely full of beads. I’ve carried it around for two and a half years, waiting for something that needed them.’ Retrieving the box from underneath her desk, she pulls off the lid with a flourish. ‘Look at that. So exciting!’ Her enthusiasm is contagious. As someone who used to work in costume, I truly understand it, thinking of my own Quality Street tin crammed full to the brim with vintage buttons. I am a sister magpie.

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Curious what it is like to work across drawing and sculpture, I ask if she sees the two facets of her practice as interrelated. She pauses for a moment, looking thoughtful. ‘I’m not sure,’ she says eventually. ‘The thing I really want to get into at the moment is installation work. And I think that comes from wanting the drawings and the sculptures to be more connected, because they’re just such different materials.’ I suggest that there’s a similarity between the raked surfaces of her plaster sculptures and the gestural finish of her drawings. ‘I’ve been putting the plaster on and scratching it in [to the wire supports],’ she says, ‘which is quite satisfying. The way I draw is also very hands-on.’

 

Edie tells me how bad episodes of eczema on her hands have meant that there have been times when she’s been unable to hold sticks of charcoal, prompting her to devise new drawing methods. Rubbing her gloved hands in the pigment, she uses her fingers and the palms of her hands to drag the dusty medium across the paper, smudging and pushing it into its surface. It is striking how bodily her work feels. Not just in subject matter, with her own form often standing as a central motif, but in their very materiality. Whether sculpture or drawing, Edie’s body is present in every mark and gesture.

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We stand together in front of a large drawing of a figure in an arched pose, atop which Edie has begun drawing a second image of her dog. ‘I quite often do this big figurative drawing, and it’s like the starting point for a piece of paper,’ she explains. ‘It’s taken me getting this drawing really, really nice for me to go, now I’m actually going to do what I wanted to do.’ 

In this case, it’s an image of her dog with his hair braided into luxurious plaits, blowing in the wind. ‘I just love drawing big. It’s my favourite thing.’ she tells me. ‘It’s like bshew, shew, pshew.’ Miming the act of drawing above her head with exaggerated gestures, her onomatopoeic exhalations of air are contagious in their joyfulness. I feel my arm twitch by my side, wanting to join in. ‘I totally get why people make ginormous paintings,’ she says. ‘It’s such an amazing feeling.’ I imagine Edie in deep concentration, dancing to and fro in front of the huge sheets of paper she pins to the studio walls.

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‘I think what the drawings and sculptures have in common is that there’s this double-sidedness to them,’ Edie ventures. ‘They often start as something I think is going to be funny but they end up being really dark. What I’m trying to do is find the balance of the subtlety of those things.’ I wonder if this moment of transformation is uncomfortable or challenging for her. ‘Does it ever surprise you?’ I ask. ‘Always,’ she says. ‘It always surprises me.’ 

 

I wonder if the shifting tone of the work reflects the way many of us navigate through the world, often employing humour as a facade to conceal that which is difficult or dark beneath. The ambiguous narratives of her drawings leaves room for us, the viewers, to bring our own interpretations to a work. ‘Something I’ve always been adamant about is that I don’t want to explain things too much because I want people to make their own mind up,’ she says. ‘I want people to have their own agency when they look at a work, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t somewhere that it came from.’

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Conversation turns to the ritual of the studio visit. ‘I’m only just getting the hang of inviting people and saying, “come, this is exciting and I can talk about it.” As opposed to…’ She trails off, uncertain. ‘Feeling the anxiety of “how do I explain something I haven’t quite conceptualised myself yet?”,’ I offer, thinking of the panic that rolls over me when people ask about my plans for the future. ‘Exactly,’ she says. 

 

Edie is a generous listener. She opens up space to talk about her work, quietly sitting back and absorbing what you say, often pausing before offering up her own reply. While my tentative interpretations are often met with her enthusiastic ‘Exactlys’, there are just as many ‘Not reallys’, followed by kind and thoughtful explanations. She might be the sole maker of her art, but she’s a collaborator when it comes to meaning-making.

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As we’ve been talking, Edie has been rummaging around in the piles of materials scattered across the studio. We’ve moved a white plaster head – her self-described ‘Giacometti self-portrait’ – onto a stool. She absentmindedly drapes a few strands of red wool over its formerly bald head. ‘Hang on,’ she says, moving to stand in front of the sculpture. Taking in the freshly laid fringe and long fiery strands falling onto the bust’s sloped shoulders, she says a little louder, ‘Hang on!’ Earlier, we’d spoken about the importance of taking time away from a work to conceptualise what it needs. How to complete it. After another pause, she nods decisively. ‘And just like that, we did it,’ she states, delighted. A few days later, I see a photograph of the work on Edie’s Instagram feed, still resplendent with its red hair.​

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As I’m writing this article – shamefully, much delayed on my end – I receive a message from Edie. ‘I’ve moved studio,’ she writes, with an invitation to visit her in Chelsea. It’s the final push I need to finish. As my fingers fly across the keys of my laptop, I wonder what the new space is like. Is it already as densely populated with things as her Archway studio? Or do they accumulate over time? Is it challenging to begin working in a new space? What is the process like of physically picking up and moving the very stuff of your artmaking? Does it spark new ideas as you rediscover forgotten objects? Jotting down the questions, I smile. Time for a second studio visit, I think.

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Kitty Gurnos-Davies

15 April 2024

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Studio images: Kitty Gurnos-Davies