An evening exploring lost, damaged and disappeared artworks, and what they can tell us about memory, value and change.

Dreamspace: Pending Approval. Ghosts of Architecture, Sculpture, Land and Industry

With: Rose Cleary, Emma Edmondson, Shaun C. Badham and Harun Morrison

Thursday 13 August | 7.00–9.00pm

Dreamspace: Pending Approval, an ambitious collective art project exploring making, learning and landscape in South Essex commissioned by Estuary Festival and Hadleigh Farm Estate.

From Wednesday 12 August until Sunday 16 August we will be gathering around the campfire for five evenings of conversation, storytelling, music and shared experiences. Set beside an industrial hangar on a working farm, overlooking rolling fields, Hadleigh Castle and the Thames Estuary, each event explores our relationship with landscape, creativity, community and making.

Ghosts of Architecture, Sculpture, Land and Industry

As the kiln burns into the evening, join Rose Cleary for a thought-provoking conversation exploring lost and damaged artworks, vanished architecture, industrial histories and the lingering presence of landscapes shaped by time.

The evening will feature readings from artist Harun Morrison around the campfire in front of the burning kiln from an accompanying publication exploring ghostly tales with writing from Emma Edmondson, Harun Morrison, Jes Fernie, Martyn Hudson, RL Wilson, Shaun C. Badham and drawings from Phil Root.

For more information on Dreamspace: Pending Approval see The Estuary Festival website

Note to reader: Due to unforseen circumsntances Martyn Hudson is no longer able to attend and chair this event. Rose Cleary has kindly joined the event.

About the speakers

Rose Cleary is a writer, who has explored to role of art in class structure and urban regeneration, particularly street art and public art events/enterprises (and especially what’s happening in Southend on Sea and local areas).

This writing has been published by New Socialist, Hyperallergic and TOMA x Estuary Festival: Precarious Straits. It also features in the anthology Southend’s Twilight Worlds.

Rose has also published long form content here - Street art: who is it for? Making meaning in Southend, Strange love for Southend or: How to stop the bomb and Empty unity: Precarious proposals and the exchange of community.

Rose's first novel, How to be a French Girl, was published by Weatherglass Books in 2023.

Martyn Hudson is Associate Professor at Northumbria University and is Head of Arts and Environment. He has written eleven books which amount to a unified cultural theory of visual and material practice and is specifically interested in Graeco-Roman antiquity, the nature of the ghost in modernity, and the philosophy of objects. He worked very closely with the artist, writer and performer Dr Emily Hesse and their book 'Visualising the Worlds of Modernity: Adventures in Shadowplay' is published by Routledge in 2027. When not writing and teaching he is to be found in obscure moorlands and fenlands tracking down standing stones and collecting stone age flints. His go-to karaoke classic is performing American Trilogy by Elvis.

Harun Morisson is an artist and writer currently based in London. He lived on-and-off the waterways for several years, getting to know stretches of the River Lea, Regents Canal and the Grand Union along the way. His studio at Old Manor Park Library is a stone's throw from River Roding Valley in Epping Forest and Wanstead Flats, which have become recurrent reference points in his thinking and work. Over the last five years Harun has co-designed or repaired a number of community gardens in Liverpool, London and Sheffield. Harun is also building and growing a database of fictional gardens from literature.

Emma Edmondson studied and graduated during the 2008 financial crash. Because of this you can often find her wondering, with a hopefulness, how austerity shapes creative survival. Alternative economies, precarity, optimism and utopian community are at the centre of her research and she makes public sculpture in many forms; from beer mats to brick walls to books to karaoke to brass signs to sculptural shelters.

Emma founded The Other MA (TOMA) in 2016, 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 austerity and the decades long businessification of creative education. These are the politics that bought TOMA into existence and form the basis of the book How to set up an art school. Emma is currently a PhD candidate at Northumbria University exploring DIY creative practices and artist-run organisational modelling under austerity (2008 - now-ish) titled: Working, singing, dancing and drinking together in the ruins: growing DIY speculative spaces for creative learning on the edgelands of austerity.

Shaun C. Badham is an artist born

Description supplied by the event organiser.