Oana Stanciu II

Romanian artist Oana Stanciu works in film and photography using herself as the model to warp reality, making the ordinary extraordinary. At the Hidden Door Festival her work inhabits the space as mesmerizing and disturbing installations. As with her piece in last years festival, this work focused on the movement of her hair using slow motion and reverse motion to make this part of her body animated into an other worldly force and being.

Theresa Moerman

Ghost Light by Theresa Moerman at The Hidden Door Festival.

"A popular theatrical superstition holds that a light left on in an unoccupied theatre provides the opportunity for its ghosts to perform.
The artist has been inspired by her own stage fright as a parallel to Leith Theatre's uncanny history of laying dormant, first due to the damage inflicted by a parachute bomb in 1941 and then after the venue was closed down again in the 1980s. 
In a site specific installation confined to the derelict female dressing room, the artist sheds new light on found materials associated with her own and the theatre's past to reanimate the silent space." Theresa Moeman

Theresa is a multi-disciplinary film, photography artist, folklore and memory are reoccurring themes in her work

Lotte Fisher II

For the last week, The Hidden Door Festival has been running in Edinburgh. This festival seeks out amazing unused spaces and brings them to life with art, theatre and music performances. This year it was in The Old Leith Theatre an incredible art deco, lost gem that has been unused for almost three decades. All spaces were used including the toilets.

It was good to catch up with Lotte Fisher's work, Lotte graduated from Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design two years ago.

For hidden door Lotte focused on the city of Islador, a city of huge variety and intrigue, with be hills, rivers, weird animals of every kind, buildings small and large, and things peeking out from unexpected places. She aims to reflect the mélange of creatures and architectural styles present in our earthly modern-day cities as well as in those of Tenzing. Tenzing is a world of strange creatures, structures and landscapes which is being slowly 'discovered' by Lotte Fisher’s alter ego, the pioneering explorer, Freeman MackInesker.
This world has it’s own language and power structures and is almost as incomprehensible to Freeman as it is to us.

Juliana Capes

I managed to get through to Edinburgh and catch the last day of The Hidden Door's Festival with my daughter and catch a little bit more of the Edinburgh College of Art Degree show which is on until Sunday the 7th of June.

In the warren of disused buildings at 'Hidden Door' there were many delights waiting to be discovered and some I hope to share with you.'Loveletters' is a joyous and colourful installation by Juliana Capes at The Hidden Door Festival in Edinburgh.

 “Unrequited love letters. A flock of hand made watercolour dyed paper aeroplanes, appearing weightless and drifting, as if caught in flight. Their stillness resembling a moment of perfect sunset. Romance. A sculpture characterised by pattern and colour rather than mass or heaviness – so much so it’s often been described as painting in space.” Juliana Capes