Name: How to Build an Art Organisation (and Keep It Alive) with Emma Edmondson
Start: 2026-05-06T18:00:00+01:00
End: 2026-05-06T20:00:00+01:00
Location: 24 Guildhall Rd

How to Build an Art Organisation (and Keep It Alive) with Emma Edmondson

Using excerpts from How to Set Up an Art School, we'll collectively imagine how arts spaces and ecosystems can survive
About this Event

In this participatory evening, artist and researcher Emma Edmondson shares insights from TOMA, an organisation shaped through experimentation, collaboration, and finding creative ways to work with what’s available. We’ll look at how artist-led initiatives can grow from modest beginnings into something sustainable, responsive, and collectively held.

The session moves from conversation into making. Using excerpts from How to Set Up an Art School, we’ll work in small groups to map the values that matter most to us—what we want to build, support, and share.

From there, participants will be paired up to imagine and construct their own speculative arts organisations. Working with hard tack - a simple, long-lasting material - you’ll create models of your ideas. As they bake, we’ll reflect on approaches to working together, including ideas around collaboration over competition, and how shared values can shape lasting creative communities.

We’ll end the evening by presenting and discussing our models: a collection of imaginative, practical, and hopeful approaches to building arts organisations for the future.

This event is part of our Guild programme

Bio

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) through micro breweries, micro pubs and alternative art schools asking: what speculative creative spaces can we make, do, and commune within into the future?