A week ago, halfway through a book tour, I stayed at Chalkwell Hall in Southend-on-Sea, an old English beach town about an hour away by train, east of London. The sprawling Georgian manor house – which for years had been derelict – had been restored in 2009 by Metal, an innovative UK arts organisation, and then turned into an art and community centre. The bedrooms upstairs host various artists in residence, and while I was there I met Ben Target, the director of an improvisational theatre group whose actors are Alzheimer’s care home residents.
Colette Bailey, the Artistic Director and Chief Executive of Metal, gave me a pamphlet the group had commissioned by author and researcher Rachel Lichtenstein, tracing the history of Chalkwell Hall all the way back to the 14th century. Surprisingly, given its elegant grandeur, until now not much has happened at Chalkwell Estate over the course of the last millennium.
Built for a merchant, George Mason, in 1830, the present house, called Chalkwell Hall, is the third home built on the estate, and the only one that’s still standing. The three-storey Georgian manor faces a park, and beyond that, a view of the Thames Estuary. I woke up in a second-floor bedroom on Sunday morning and looked out at a shimmering strip of water that flows to the English Channel, through enormous floor-to-ceiling French windows. With its wide plank floors, high ceilings, and lime plaster walls dyed the colour of burnt poppies, Chalkwell Hall begs for a Jane Austen romance – stories of engagements and wills, weddings and balls – but the owners were never resident there. The house was rented to tenant farmers. The only traces of daily life Lichtenstein found were inventories and tools and appliances. The house has now become the site of different stories.
"The act of creating is one of the most enduring forms of self-care, so much more satisfying than buying bath oil or lipstick."
Emma Edmondson invited me to Chalkwell Hall for the weekend to teach for a day at The Other MA (TOMA), an unaccredited MA programme she started three years ago with Metal. As the group writes on its site:
“TOMA was created in response to the hierarchies surrounding accessing education; hidden hierarchies such as not being able to self-care and self- invest due to other life commitments, not have the art-specific language expected to access the art world, and more obvious ones such as time, cost, age and geography. TOMA welcomes mothers, fathers, carers, cleaners, technicians, admin assistants, project managers, recent graduates, Eighties’ graduates and everyone in between.”
Eight of us sat in a room downstairs on Sunday and shared our work over five hours. Rose Cleary read her essay/review of her friend’s show at a new London gallery; Imogen Welch showed her ingenious collection of tiny metal-cast pieces of trash picked up on the beach in Southend. Twice a month since the programme began, she has collected different types of debris from the beach to be cast, and documents the location, date, time and weather. Performer and media artist Laura Adamson showed photos of costumes she’d made for parties/performances in London. The act of creating is one of the most enduring forms of self-care, so much more satisfying than buying bath oil or lipstick.
The TOMA group meets about once a week on Thursdays or weekends to do workshops, critiques, critical theory and sessions with visiting artists. Some of the members come from as far as two hours away. Edmondson guides, but doesn’t exactly lead. An art school dropout in her late teens, she produced after-parties and wrote music reviews for NME. When she returned to art school in 2009, the subsequent Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government raised university tuition fees the following year. Her institute’s library was shut to save money. In response, she and other art students took it over. “It was a really sad time,” she recalls, “but also exciting due to the mini-communities forming to ‘make things work’.” When she moved from London to Southend-on- Sea with her spouse, plans for TOMA fell into place.
All weekend, mid-tour, I felt supported by the goodwill surrounding this project. With no tuition, no grades, no degrees, the only thing that makes TOMA credible is the commitment made by its members. Teaching – the economic means of survival for many artists and writers – can be an exhausting, resented energy drain. But the five hours I spent with the group passed very quickly.
This article originally appeared in SLEEK 60, out now.