EMMA EDMONDSON: A Podcast by SPILL Festival

A podcast series by SPILL Festival

Hello! This is Robin Deacon, Artistic Director of SPILL, an arts organisation based in Ipswich, Suffolk. Welcome to our second podcast series featuring conversations with artists and makers of all kinds that SPILL has presented, worked with or admired from a distance.

 In this, the last episode of this series, I am talking to Emma Edmondson, a remarkable artist and organiser based in Essex, in the East of England. Emma is founder of the Southend based alternative art school, TOMA. TOMA is an acronym for ‘The Other MA’, and is an 18 month artist-run education model which supports artists who have faced barriers accessing art education and the ‘art world’. In the podcast, Emma speaks about the conditions the led to TOMA coming into being in 2016 – austerity and tuition fee rises, as well has her own experiences with mainstream art school education that led her to feel that a different approach and ethos was needed.

 Although we spent a lot of our conversation talking about TOMA, it was also great to explore her other arts projects. These include her explorations of the demise of nightclub culture in Essex as well as the histories of brickmaking in this region. Her descriptions of these projects were accompanied by some fascinating anecdotes of her navigating relationship with local building developers and councils.

 Emma recently announced she is stepping back from her role at TOMA, but her experiences have been compiled in her new book ‘How to set up an Art School’. This book is well worth a read for anybody who is interested in histories and contemporary approaches to alternative arts education.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this conversation.

 Here is the website for TOMA: https://www.toma-art.com

Here is where you can grab a copy of ‘How to set up an art school’ (tiered pricing): https://www.toma-art.com/new-page-38

 - Robin

Credits
Presented and edited by Robin Deacon
Music composed by Loula Yorke