Emma Edmondson & Shaun C. Badham
Dreamspace: Pending Approval is a conduit for Edmondson and Badham’s ongoing research and creative practice centralising on sculpture exploring DIY ethos’ through third spaces, public space and people coming together to create durational change. Recently, they have worked together as part of artist collective the Care Contractors who have been exploring how to care for public art in Basildon. Through research and public events, they have explored the shifting perspectives of Basildons public art and how they can be re imagined, engaged with and cared for today. Dreamspace: Pending Approval will be the first time they have worked collaboratively as a duo on a sculptural commission, having spent many years teaching and collaborating in other ways.
Emma Edmondson is an artist and organiser based in Southend-on-Sea. Influenced by her experience of graduating art school during the 2008 financial crash, alternative economies, precarity and utopian community are central to her practice, exploring how recessions and austerity shape creative survival.
In 2016 Emma set up The Other MA (TOMA), an accessible artist-run education model and the only postgraduate level art programme in Essex. The decades-long businessification and dismantling of creative education, alongside tuition fee rises, means it is difficult for artists to flourish unless they become part of the financialised art world. These are the politics that bought TOMA into existence. Emma writes about lichen, advocating for how small creative organisations can embrace their ways of being, becoming more lichen-like, collaborative over competitive, an approach reflected through TOMA’s practices.
In a recent Focal Point Gallery commission Emma explored the history and ownership of local land by processing raw clay from the ground to make bricks by hand to create sculptures that sit on the ground they were made from. Made from this Land is a permanent sculptural work marking public rights of way and historical sites to encourage people’s use of them. She believes in the power of people coming together to change sector policy, systems and rules and a collaborative co-commission asks ‘What makes good public art?’. Emma teaches art in community spaces, education settings and arts organisations on precarious contracts and also co-runs Dog Ear, producing dog toy sculptures and texts exploring interaction and art making between humans and non humans.
Often responding to the socio-political, historical and human attributes of a given site, Shaun C. Badham instigates long-term collaborative projects that are realised across different mediums, from local community actions to large-scale sculptural installations. He produces installations and objects that draw out our relationship to exterior spaces and structures from the urban to the Edgelands.
I’M STAYING (2014 to 2021) was a large-scale text-based neon sculpture which travelled around the city of Bristol, moving quarterly via democratic vote for 2 and a half years. The locations were determined by the Bristol public, which informed meaning, therefore addressing the piece as both a statement of provocation and affirmation.
MORNING (2014 to 2018) attempted to identify the correlation between a series of architectural space-race themed climbing frames, designed in the 1970s, situated in my birthtown, with the area’s inclusion in the Basildon New Town experiment, and their simultaneous periods of change. After years of lobbying, the frames were painted, enabling them to glow in the dark at night.
PLOT (2018 to 2025) initially explored the rise and fall of the Basildon Plotlanders; the last, back the land, self-build, DIY community in England whom were displaced due to the area being designated as a new town in 1946 and the policies that followed. The project has explored issues around managed decline through key resources such as mains services, privatisation of land and the role Basildon Development Corporation took to sped up the historization of the plotlanders.
Photo Credit: Luke Bligh
