Monument to the Vanquished

Project Insights

Monument to the Vanquished is an ambitious visual arts project that invites a wide audience to reflect on the structure of contemporary society. By engaging rural and urban audiences, the project fosters critical conversations around migration, ownership, and power, offering new ways to explore the foundations of contemporary British society. It draws on overlooked elements of social history and human stories to create a fresh entry point for these discussions.

Since 2022, Meadow Arts has collaborated with Leah Gordon and Annabel Edwards on Parts I & II of Monument to the Vanquished, which were presented at The Hive and Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery in Shropshire, commissioned and supported by Meadow Arts and GRAIN Projects. Part III, Vagabonds, features new works exploring the rural exodus that led many to either join or be marginalised by the emerging industrial society. These themes resonate deeply with contemporary Britain, highlighting issues of ownership, migration, and the urban-rural divide.

The project takes its name from a 1525 sketch by Albrecht Dürer, who imagined a memorial (which was never realised) to the brutal suppression of the German peasant revolts: an allegorical column topped by a stabbed peasant. Gordon revives and reinterprets that idea on English soil, honouring those displaced and impoverished by centuries of land enclosures, reawakening public awareness of the struggle for land rights.

The Enclosure Acts, which gathered pace in the 18th century, marked a turning point in English society. Over centuries the process of enclosure meant that rural peasants lost their common rights of use over the land. Resources which had previously been shared and stewarded collectively now became the exclusive property of the landowner. This process often led to mass displacement and increased poverty, as well as the erosion of community ties and sustainable environmental practices.

Gordon believes that it is impossible to understand the structure of contemporary society without understanding the history of enclosure. The project reframes this history, not as a distant legal process, but as an enduring, embodied experience with urgent relevance today. Questions about the nature of capitalism as well as issues of ownership and access to the land, its use and abuse, have come back to haunt our current politics and wider culture.

Leah Gordon continues to collaborate with globally renowned author and collector Stephen Ellcock, whose work in global folk art and folklore adds a rich, rebellious dimension to the project. Monument to the Vanquished Peasant exhibition at the Herbert Art Gallery & Museum in partnership with Coventry Biennial, October 2025, combines the project as a whole, explores the devastating impact of land enclosures on people and land across England. Through photography, montage and constructed images, it offers a radical reimagining of English history and society.

Monument to the Vanquished Peasant is presented in four interwoven chapters:

PART I | THE COMMONERS
In Shropshire, Gordon sought out surviving pockets of common land and the people who still hold common rights. Their portraits are shot on black-and-white medium-format film and hand-tinted by artist Marg Duston and appear alongside texts by Annabel Edwards, capturing local myths and personal memories of connections to the land.

PART II | RURAL REBELS
Montages and portraits of British folk traditions reveal how protest and folk traditions merge, maintaining memory and resistance across generations. Gordon created a unique process for the montages, printing selected layers on fine kozo paper made from the bark of mulberry trees and subsequently waxed using encaustic beeswax.

PART III | VAGABONDS

Gordon addresses the long-term consequences of enclosure: rural exodus and urban migration. Her portraits of New Age travellers and road activists explore grassroots resistance to the loss of land rights. Newly produced work includes images of abandoned caravans in the Welsh borders, and constructed portraits inspired by 18th-century illustrations by John Thomas Smith in Vagabondiana. Each work holds traces of individual stories, collective resistance and quiet refusal to be erased.

PART IV | ALLOTMENTS

This section explores hopeful methods of repairing our relationship with the land through portraits of local Coventry allotment holders, reflecting on contemporary land use.

THE WALLPAPERS

The two wallpapers are drawn by artist Marg Duston and designed by Gordon. Both versions represent the constellation of Hydra. In the first, Hydra is replaced with the Bryony plant and root, which in English folk traditions is known as “English Mandrake” or “Womandrake”, owing to its large, human-like root. It is associated with protection, prosperity and fertility. In the second, Hydra is replaced with the ‘many-headed hydra’ representing the internationalist motley crew which battles against enclosure and capitalism to this day. In the background of both are Noctua and Corvus, the owl and the crow, that represent a constellation of grassroots knowledge.

STEPHEN ELLCOCK FILM

The artworks are further contextualised by a special film presentation of images selected by the author and image collector Stephen Ellcock.

Resources

Download

Leah Gordon, Monument to the Vanquished, Rural Rebels.

Leah Gordon, Commoners, 2020. Commissioned by GRAIN Projects and Meadow Arts.

Leah Gordon, Caravan, Ty-Rhos, Pentre Evan Wood, Pembrokeshire, 2023. Image courtesy of the artist.

Leah Gordon, Monument to the Vanquished Peasant, Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, 2025. Images courtesy of Meadow Arts. Photographer, Gary Jones.

Artists

Leah Gordon

Leah Gordon is an artist, curator and writer whose work explores the interlinked histories of the Caribbean plantation system, the Enclosure Acts, and the creation of the British working-class. Often amplifying ‘histories from below’, her work recognises the role of carnival, folk traditions and grassroots actions in both performing and sustaining radical histories.

Her film and photographic work has been exhibited internationally, she is the co-director of the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and in 2022 she produced an award-winning feature documentary Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti, which was screened in cinemas and on BBC 4’s Arena. In 2023 her works were acquired by the Kadist Collection and the Royal Museums Greenwich, and in 2024 she exhibited in group shows at Museum Van Loon in Amsterdam, UMOCA, Salt Lake City and Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

Monument to the Vanquished Part I | The Commoners and Part II | Rural Rebels are a Meadow Arts project with artist Leah Gordon and researcher Annabel Edwards that explores the social history of land enclosure in England and Wales.

Go to artist profile

Partners

The Commoners were commissioned and supported by Meadow Arts and GRAIN Projects. Rural Rebels and Urban Vagabonds were commissioned by Meadow Arts.