Tim Burrows & Emma Edmondson

Artist Emma Edmondson and writer Tim Burrows are collaborating for Estuary 2025 on the project Clubbing and Commune-in in Essex interrogating the once dominant nightclub culture of Essex. The project will be launched with major new artistic and literary works and it includes a Book Launch event, a video installation, a talk, and a Raquels nightclub reunion.

Emma Edmondson

Emma Edmondson is an artist and organiser who lives and works in Southend-on-Sea. Studying and graduating during the 2008 financial crash alternative economies, precarity and utopian community are at the centre of her research and practice. She works with sculpture, print, text and education and is interested in how recessions and austerity shape how we survive creatively.

In 2016 she set up TOMA an accessible artist-run education model which is currently the only postgrad-ish level art programme in Essex after all others were stopped by their host universities. TOMA sits outside the traditional institutional model and was born of and been shaped by austerity and the decades long business-ification and dismantling of creative education. These are the politics that bought TOMA into existence.

Recently she has been processing raw clay dug from the ground and exploring local land rights to create sculptures that sit on the ground they were made from, marking out little know public rights of way to encourage local people’s use of them. Through this she wants to start conversations about agency, land ownership and our connections to the land we live on. She has also been writing about lichen and thinking about how small organisations should embrace their ways of being, becoming more lichenlike, putting this into action through TOMA. She always works collaboratively believing in collaboration over competition and the power of people coming together to change sector policy, systems and rules.

She has shown her work in spaces around the UK including Victoria & Albert Museum, Barbican, and a solo show at Arcade/Campfa in Cardiff. She has been awarded commissions from Focal Point Gallery, AHRC,Creative Basildon, Creative Estuary and Artquest and been published in Art Monthly and a soon to be published Routledge publication on alternative art schools. She teaches art in community spaces, schools, college, arts organisations and universities to support her practice, on precarious contracts. Emma also runs Dog Ear with Lu Williams, producing dog toy sculptures and texts for humans and hounds focussing on the mental health benefits of play and interaction between humans and non humans, alongside sustainable making.

Tim Burrows

Tim is a writer and journalist for internationally respected organisations including the Guardian. He is the author of The Invention of Essex by Profile Books, which was published by Profile Books in 2023 to rave reviews from Amy Liptot (‘Evocative and smart’), Jonathan Meades (‘stellar performance’), Owen Hatherley (‘a great book about a built landscape of social mobility’), and Alex Niven (‘Tim Burrows is one of the finest and most humane writers on these islands’). The Invention of Essex was a culmination of years of work looking at Essex as not just a place, but a political myth and also a solution to London and south-east England’s many housing crises. More broadly he is a creative practitioner of place. For the best part of two decades he has drilled down into deep meaning of different post-industrial UK regions, from Greater London to Grimsby. He lives in Southend-on-Sea, Essex

Images: Emma Edmondston, Tim Burrows.