Shaun C. Badham is an artist based in South Essex, working in a variety of medium, processes and contexts. His project-based practice explores notions of the discarded in both objects, structures, places and histories, and how a form of site responsive re-imagining can take place. Through a series of observations, the overlooked can generate long term durational projects through a task driven, pragmatist mentality to create a new understanding of our relationship to space. Through artistic interventions and public activation, established societal categories such as ownership and intended use are challenged and transformed.
PLOT/EDGELANDS (2018 to present) initially explored the rise and fall of the Basildon Plotlanders, a back the land, self-build, DIY community whom were displaced due to the area being designated as a new town in 1946 and the policies that followed. While tracing the history of the plotlands, it has revealed they endured forms of managed decline, denialism and corruption, which has informed two podcasts, research panels, sculpture, talks, lecterns, interventions. Over the last 2 years I have collaboratively been self-building cabins on land which has either been abandoned, disused, or land banked. What does it mean to do this today, when the policies which made the Plotlanders illegal are still upheld?
MORNING (2014 to 2018) attempted to identify the correlation between a series of architectural space-race themed climbing frames, designed in the 1970s, situated in my birth town, with the area’s inclusion in the Basildon New Town experiment, and their simultaneous periods of change. After years of lobbying, the frames were painted, enabling them to glow in the dark at night. The project generated drawings, videos, posters, t-shirts, design of a site-specific play space, a road sign and a painterly intervention. Components of the project went on tour from Basildon to Southend, London and Cornwall, presenting a spare Glow in the Dark Moon Probe Sculpture and a publication housing an interview between curator warren harper and myself with a commissioned text by Design Historian Stephanie Sutton.
I’M STAYING (2014 to 2021) was a large-scale text-based neon sculpture which travelled around the city of Bristol, moving quarterly via democratic vote for 2 and a half years. The locations were determined by the Bristol public, which informed meaning, therefore addressing the piece as both a statement of provocation and affirmation. A majority of locations suggested to host the neon sculpture were deemed as a place of local value by the surrounding community with some under threat to remain. The project created drawings, stamped Bristol currency, prints, video, installation, survey paintings, and t shirts. In 2018 I’M STAYING travelled to London for Sculpture in the City, where the discourse surrounding the work shifted from the hyper local in Bristol to Brexit. The project then created a series of 36 ink/water colour drawing translating the phrase to new languages by local residents in London.