Bio
The art of Mike Edwards ranges from realistic drawings to mathematical calculations, from blue prints to loose sketches. Sculptures and images of boats, buildings, toys, and waves arranged in various combinations, bending logic, mixing context, and adding metaphor. Art can abandon the laws of physics, like a diagram in a science textbook, simplifying the world in an attempt to grasp its complexities. A sculpture of a wave shows a cross-section of a whitecap down through the water column, below the ocean floor reacts in ripples of sand and deeper the earth's crust buckles into folds of stone. Edwards uses nature to speak of nature, uses charcoal to describe black, a stone boat floating on a pool of mercury to address ideas of buoyancy. Mike creates artworks that act as experimental devices.
He is a multi-disciplinary sculptor and painter working in various processes with diverse mediums and methods such as wood and stone carving, welded metal fabrication, cast bronze and other materials. Edwards' technical art foundations were laid at the Toronto Art Centre and led to numerous contracts with prominent west coast sculptors. He has contributed his skills to large public art projects including works at the Vancouver Airport, National Gallery of Canada, and Bill Reid's sculpture featured on the Canadian twenty-dollar bill. His fascination for the academic world finds its roots at York University where he first began to discover content for his artwork in fields such as biology, psychology and physics. As an artist in residence, he has worked as a gallery administrator, and as a public art gallery curator. He is also the recipient of several grants, including Vancouver Foundation and B.C. Arts Council. Edwards is also a Sessional Instructor at Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, and has been showing in galleries in Vancouver, the Fraser Valley and Toronto.