Edwin Mingard

Edwin Mingard is a socially engaged visual artist with a specialism in collaboratively made moving images. His practice spans photography, film and installation, and often involves creating works with groups and individuals who are underrepresented in contemporary art contexts. Mingard’s commitment to this is fuelled by his experiences growing up in a low-income household, moving around remote locations in the North of England, and wanting to become an artist but with no clear route to doing so. 

In his professional life, he has worked with people who have experienced homelessness, the care system, the asylum system and border regime, and working-class communities. He explores who makes work, how, why, and for whom, and ways that experiments in this process can lead to individual and collective growth and change. This focus is visible in the subject matter of his work, which explores and questions our social relations with one another. 

In addition to his own practice, Mingard has founded collaborative organisations in the arts sector, including Deptford Cinema and Satellite, an artists’ moving image production company. His film, An Intermission, made with young people experiencing homelessness in Stoke-on-Trent, was acquired by the Arts Council for the National Art Collection in 2023. 

Mingard’s work has been commissioned by the British Film Institute, DocSociety, Arts Council England, Channel 4, the RSA, Wellcome Trust, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and others. He was selected as one of 2020’s Bloomberg New Contemporaries; received a Jury Special Mention at IDFA (Amsterdam); was longlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize and selected as a Film London Lodestar. His most recent work, an artist’s film exploring the impacts of the UK’s anti-migrant Hostile Environment policies, was exhibited by UCL East in 2023. 

Mingard is currently working on two long-term projects. One is an artist film on Unst, the UK’s most northerly point, with long term collaborator Geo Barcan and a community of people living around the development site of the UK’s first vertical launch spaceport. The second, supported by Chisenhale Gallery, is a series of exhibitions, films and installations made with a group of young people who have been excluded from mainstream education.