Monument to the Vanquished Peasant. Leah Gordon

Leah Gordon explores the impact of the Enclosure Acts in England and Wales: a centuries-long process that deprived rural communities of access to common land and turned shared resources into the exclusive property of landowners. The resulting mass displacement to cities, poverty and loss of community ties continue to resonate in current debates around capitalism, land ownership and access to land.

Monument to the Vanquished Peasant takes its title from a 1525 sketch by Albrecht Dürer, in which he imagined a monument to the victims of the brutal suppression of the German Peasants’ Revolt. Gordon revisits this idea to honour the struggle for land rights and bring a history “from below” to light.

For this project, Gordon travelled across the UK and worked for more than five years with artist Marg Duston and writer and researcher Annabel Edwards, collaborating with communities connected to common land and the legacy of the enclosures. Through photography, montage and constructed images, the exhibition brings together memory, activism and social history to question the ways in which land, ownership and power continue to shape our society.