Megan Rudden: Love in the Ecotone

Megan Rudden: Love in the Ecotone

Exhibition Run: 18 July – 12 October 2025

Viewable daily, 7am – 7pm, from the street.

Hawthornvale Space

Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop is delighted to present Love in the Ecotone, an installation of new work by Megan Rudden for the Hawthornvale Space.

The Ecotone describes a transitional space between two environments, a boundary that does not separate but rather intimately connects different systems. Rudden’s cast and carved and scattered materials, consider the material world through words and watery relations. Liquid metaphors that develop connections between sculpture, language and the body. The gallery becomes a meeting ground where these concepts interact, and transform. Through the tensions and flows within this complex space of intersection, new structural properties and meanings emerge, reshaping all systems in the process. Slippery materials, salt, water, resin, mothers’ milk, acrylic and words, flow through the ecotone reflecting and becoming, taking form for a moment only to dissolve, creating a temporary overlap between states. Drawing from Astrida Neimanis’ essay ‘Hydrofeminism: Or, On Becoming a Body of Water’, at the heart of the installation is the body in fluid form, a fundamental part of the natural world, neither separated from, nor privileged to it. Although held within perceivably rigid structures, the body continues to ebb and flow, repulse and attract, drawing out and activating the potentials, connections and actions, as we relinquish any lingering illusion of separation.

Rudden has also produced a new piece of writing to sit alongside this installation. The exhibition text becomes another site to explore the interactions between words and the material world. Reflecting also on her experience of becoming a mother, Rudden considers how pregnancy, birth and child raising can act as a microcosm through which to examine our watery connections to both inner and outer worlds.

Join us to celebrate with Megan Rudden and Louise Gibson the other artist commissioned for our summer programme on Saturday 9 August 2025, 7 – 9pm.

This project is presented by ESW as part of Edinburgh Art Festival which runs from 7 – 24 August 2025.

Megan Rudden

Megan Rudden is an artist and writer from Leith, currently based in Glasgow. Her interdisciplinary practice moves across performance, object making, text and drawing. She is a recent graduate of MLitt Art Writing at Glasgow School of Art.

You can find out more about her practice here