Edgelands Research

Edgelands Research Projects is the collaborative art and research practice of Meryl Quinn and Lucas Drummond.

Building upon common threads in our individual practices, Edgelands explores the blurry lines between urban and rural, industrial and ‘wild’, formal and feral. It considers these distinctions as increasingly arbitrary; as urban sprawl stretches the boundaries of cities into floodplains, firebreaks and fragile ecosystems, as micro plastics are found everywhere from farm crops and aquifers to newborns, and so-called wilderness areas are used as political window dressing for resource extraction.

Our practice looks towards the near future where everywhere is an edge—a space of increased environmental, and concomitant social, precarity. Inspired by the work of writers like Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway, we feel an increased urgency to make sense of the lessons in the edgelands. Using an art practice of attention, we aim to thread together scraps of historical making, community traditions, food ethnographies and environmental relations, and from these pieces create a patchwork of lifeways to guide us forward.