Estuary 2025 film programme

Jane Woollatt and Beverley Carruthers

Beverley and Jane meet on Two Tree Island, an intertidal space in the Thames Estuary creating impromptu performances to an accidental audience. Over their many encounters they have embodied fury, loss, protest and kinship. The project has evolved, initially they made images in response to their observation of social invisibility, that seemed to happen with ageing. Through this exploration, two wise women characters emerged. As part of their continued investigation, they also drew on stories from folklore and mythology through this research otherworldly characters have appeared in their work. Within their combined practice they use performance, costume, photography, sculpture, sound art, walking and writing.

Catherine Yass

Catherine Yass’s films and photographs address the way that humans shape our built and natural environment through their ideologies and desire for power. She uses colour and movement to disorientate and disrupt habitual viewing, allowing the world to be seen through feeling and affect. Colour is defamiliarised through unconventional methods of cross processing and light leaks, photographs disintegrate and movement is disorientated through dislocated viewpoints, reversal and inversion. Buildings become unfamiliar, often revealing the collusion between the lens and architecture that reinforces institutional ideologies.

Major commissions, residencies and awards include

2024: Paddington Square permanent public art work for St Mary’s Hospital, commissioned by Lacuna Projects for Great Western Developments

2023: Flood Barrier, commissioned by Create London.                                                                                                              2019: Legacy, Supreme Court, commissioned by Spark 21 to celebrate 100 years of women in the Law.                                                                                                    
2017: Aeolian Piano, commissioned by White Noise for the departure of the BBC for the BBC TV Centre.

Ryan Powell

Ryan Powell is an artist working with different forms and materials to explore the politics of space and the interplay between human action and the natural world.

His recent work engages with the active agency of the more than human world, seeking new ways of people experiencing and connecting with the vitality of the living world. He continues to work on and with the River Roding in East London.

Jonathan Goldberg

Jonathan Goldberg is a photographer and filmmaker based in North west London. His projects explore man’s relationship with the environment. 

In 2022 Goldberg was awarded a Arts Council England grant for his project Estuary Hopes, Upstream Dreams (Thames Islands), a project which was exhibited at Brentford’s Waterman’s Centre and the River and Rowing Museum in Henley.

In 2019 he was selected for a 6 month residency for the Canal and River Trust, culminating in a solo exhibition at the National Waterways Museum (2021). 

Goldberg’s previous projects include The Runways Stops Here (2012-2018), which documents the plight of eco-activists at Grow Heathrow over a 5 year period. The series was reproduced in National Geographic and exhibited at the Northern Eye Festival in Wales. The accompanying film was screened at the Portobello Film Festival, and shortlisted for the Earth Photo awards exhibition.

Prior to that Goldberg was commissioned to produce a photo-essay on the theme of Sustainable Transport (2014), as part of the Brighton Biennial, in partnership with FotoDocument and One Planet Living, for an exhibition on public view at Brighton Station. 

Goldberg works on editorial and commercial commissions in between longer term assignments. He studied Editorial Photography at Brighton University.

Michael Upton

Michael Upton is an educator and artist. Presently Head of Teaching and Learning Development at London Metropolitan University, he has taught on courses including BA Film and Television Production and is a member of the Centre for Creative Arts, Cultures and Engagement (CREATURE). 

He worked for many years as mentor of the East End Archive team led by Susan Andrews. His published writing includes an essay for Shadows of Doubt: A Psycho-geographic Enquiry into the Childhood of Alfred Hitchcock (2011) chapters for Archive: Imagining The East End (Black Dog Press, 2013) and Uncertain States journal. Between 2012-18 he ran the galleries at London Met’s art school, programming or curating many exhibitions. Estuary English, a collaboration with photographer David George won the NCM/Foyle Commission in 2015. In 2016 he curated After London at The Bank Gallery, a photographic exhibition which coincided with the publication of the book Estuary by Rachel Lichtenstein. His own practice combines walking, running, and swimming with photography and has recently been exhibited in Making Matters 4.0 and at the 60th Essex Open, and is included in the inaugural The Journal of Discarded Daydreams from Newcastle University (2024). In 2025 he curated INTO THE ZONE: Journeys in The Thames Estuary exhibition for the Beecroft Art Gallery in Southend-on-Sea.

Simon Rattigan

Simon Rattigan is a U.K. born film and video artist who grew up in Johannesburg, South Africa and is currently living in London. He Graduated from Chelsea school of art in London with an MA in fine art. He has developed his practice through researching the relationships of moving image, sound and language to explore sensory and autobiographical experience. His works transform found and new footage to interweave personal narrative with political and historical structures. His works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, and made use of Museum displays and archival materials taking the form of installations, videos and books.

Aislinn Evans

'I make videos and prints and prints of videos and videos with prints in them and writing and stuff. I like walking around industrial estates, motorways, dockyards, rivers, and landfills. Films and videos and other things come out of these walks, scored by the conversations I have on them. I want to look round the back of our country, where power hides, where people and things get discarded. I want looking round the back to highlight that our landscape is designed with intention, that intention is to control and maintain hegemony, heighten exploitation and grow profits, and that those designs influence how we move through our landscape. Then I want to move differently.'

George Morgan

George Morgan is an Artist filmmaker, videographer, producer and educator based in Essex.

George's creative practice as a socially engaged Artist filmmaker extends beyond documentation, It’s fundamentally driven by his passion to converse, collaborate and celebrate untold stories with communities using experimental and traditional filmic tools. His work explores themes of identity, time, class and trauma using non-fiction and archival material.

George's relationship with expanded cinema heavily influences his practice and often dictates the untraditional public spaces in which films are projected.

Sam Williams

Sam Williams is an artist with a practice that intertwines moving-image, collage, choreography, sound and writing. His ongoing research focuses on multispecies entanglements, ecological systems, bodies-as-worlds and folk mythologies and how they propose possibilities for present and future ways of non-human-centric living.

Sam is based in London where he is a resident at Somerset House Studios. He has presented work at institutions including Chisenhale Gallery, Arnolfini, Siobhan Davies Dance, Somerset House, Tate Britain, Studio Voltaire and South Kiosk (UK), She Will (Norway); Röda Sten Konsthall (SE); Kino Arsenal, Akademie der Kunst, Tanzhalle Wisenberg and B3 Biennale (Germany).