Food Gatherings: Who Owns The Land? With Emma Edmondson and Shaun C Badham

Join artists Emma Edmondson and Shaun C Badham for an evening of activity exploring the theme of land ownership, agency and what’s possible when things go wrong. The event will include talks around artists’ agency, protest postcard writing, hearty root vegetable stew and a quiz titled Who Owns the Land? Prizes included.

This session is part of our What’s Possible When Things Go Wrong, a series of celebrations, sharings, and dinners to mark our final moments in the building and to explore what is possible when the sh*t hits the fan.

Studying and graduating during the 2008 financial crash alternative economies and utopian community are at the centre of Emma Edmondson’s practice. Through sculpture, print, sound and text, she explores the power of people coming together through creative projects to change systems and rules. 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. Through this she wants to start conversations about agency, land ownership and our connections as humans to the land we live on.

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 businessification and dismantling of creative education. This, alongside the rise of tuition fees, 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.

https://www.emmaedmondson.com/

Shaun produces installations and objects that draw out our relationship to exterior spaces and structures from the urban to the edgelands. These projects offer a use value, with how the works are occupied, determined or engaged with. The operative element plays out durationally, whether that’s changing policy on how a local council regenerate play spaces or how a city grants permission for a touring public sculpture.

Shaun has instigated long-term collaborative projects that are realised across different mediums, from local community actions to large-scale sculptural installations. Notable projects include, I’M STAYING (2014 to 2021), MORNING (2014 to 2018) and PLOT (2018 to 2024), MARKING THE LAND (2022 to present) and EDGELANDS (2022 to present). Shaun is a co-director of Bas-Arts-Index.

https://shauncbadham.com/

Metal and the other organisations based at Chauffeurs Cottage will be leaving in December. It wasn’t our decision and it’s one we’re still trying to get our heads around, but we’re working hard to find a new space in the city that will be just as wonderful, whilst celebrating all the magical moments we’ve spent here.

Being thrown into this situation has made us reflect on ‘necessity as a mother of invention’ – being faced with a challenging situation and being inspired to create a new imaginative solution. It’s made us dream about inspiring futures and what a queer, accessible, anti-racist space would look like from scratch.

Host or Publisher Metal Peterborough