Gina Fierlafijn Reddie
Contact details
- Street
-
Volunteer contact address
granton:hub
Madelvic House
Granton Park Avenue
Edinburgh EH5 1HS - City
- Post code
Background
With the help of a University staff scholarship, Gina successfully obtained her MSc in Digital Education with a dissertation supervised by Dr Jen Ross on the topic of curating art through social media platforms. The dissertation was submitted as a web essay in 2014 and is still the inspiration for her experimenting with art.
In February 2020, she moved to Edinburgh College of Art where her role focused on pre-award and post-award financial management, with dedicated support for research projects in the School of Design and contributing to the ongoing development of an effective service for grant administration. During a 6-month secondment (Jan-June 2022) she researched a number of opportunities for gathering data and intelligence on ECA’s research culture, preparing reports and presenting findings at various meetings. This activity resulted in the delivery of a research intelligence database (2023) hosted on SharePoint and available to academics and professional services colleagues.
Outside work, Gina is a trustee at granton:hub, a small charity located in the north of Edinburgh. Here she leads on facilitating art events such as planning and curating art exhibitions and art fairs. She also develops heritage engagement activities, for example she was the main lead for the Curious Edinburgh heritage walking tour. The Granton tour was the first community tour based outside the city centre campus. The hosting of this tour has led to additional activities such as the ‘Art in Granton’ exhibition (October 2019). Gina presented the walking tour in April 2018, see this video on YouTube. Her current focus is Filling the GAP, the Granton Archive Project. This project looks into setting up a digital archival record of the many documents, photographs and AV materials granton:hub has received.
She had successful art installations featuring derelict industrial buildings and heritage landscapes. Three of her art installation videos are available on YouTube. Check out Down the Wire (2019) and The Visitor (2016). She recently produced a video poem Until We Fall (2021) as part of a group art exhibition she organised in July 2021 on the topic of recycling and included in the Edinburgh Science Festival. All videos involve a collaboration with the Edinburgh based musician Harry Bongo.
Project activity
The Curious Edinburgh heritage walking tour was updated in 2020 with examples of the Art in Granton 2019 exhibition. Some of the tour stops now have the artworks curated alongside the heritage stories.
I organised the Recycl-Age Art exhibition, 9-11 July 2021. This event was selected as part of this Coastal Knowledge project led by Dr Niki Vermeulen and included in the Edinburgh Science Festival. In addition I was successful in obtaining a Local Edinburgh micro grant which funded a workshop inviting 6-8 youngsters to make artworks out of recycled materials. The artworks were included in the exhibition.
More recently I organised the Art and Heritage exhibition (Sept 2021) which complemented the granton:hub heritage exhibition, with 13 artists who took inspiration from Granton’s heritage or local scenery.
In February 2022, granton:hub welcomed CUTE, CUlture at The Edge, a European funded student-led research project which invited the local Granton community to share their views on what's happening with cultural heritage. The presentations of the findings took place on the 25th of February and all the researchers, including myself as a community representative were invited to take part in a European conference in Paris, on March 17-18. This project has now received follow-up funding and further meetings and workshops are planned in 2023.
I am interested in the opportunities and challenges of digital spaces for cultural experiences. I have experimented with a number of online platforms for developing cultural walking tours. Examples are:
Curating Art Exploring Edinburgh 2015 - hosted on the app Guidigo
Using Google Glasses and a conceptual tour of the University Campus hosting art - 2015 video hosted on YouTube (unfortunately an upgrade of YouTube has removed all annotated text)
Mapping Art in Granton. Another project was developed in 2016 on Trover, a travel and tourist app which specialised in geo-tagging, publishing, and sharing travel photography, allowing for short stories to be added to each upload and fellow 'Trovers' making comments. Trover has been bought up by Expedia in the summer of 2020 and has now been shut down.
19 March 2018: Presentation ‘the aesthetics of everyday life’ as part of the University of Edinburgh Chaplancy The Slow University, ‘Know Yourself’ series.