Film programme at Gravesend Town Pier

We are delighted to present this programme of artists moving works. The Estuary 2025 film programme explores wider metaphors connecting to the Vessels theme and our relationship to the Estuary, acting as a container for stories in transit. Through the programme you will encounter vessels appearing in many different forms: as boats, bodies, cameras, rivers, and the medium of the film in a sense holding what might otherwise be lost.

Each work traces a gesture of offering – whether to an ancestor, a river, a body in transformation, or a threatened ecology – foregrounding connection and care in times of reorientation.

Water becomes a carrier of memory, resistance, and renewal – for example in In The Sensory Attunement Coracle, artist Ryan Powell floats down the River Roding in a handmade hazel and reed vessel, inviting the viewer into a ritual of slowness and recalibration. The coracle’s passage through a neglected waterway becomes an act of listening – to the river, to the self, and to histories submerged beneath the surface.

That submerged tension also surfaces in Catherine Yass’s Flood Barrier, where birds navigate the architecture of Barking Creek’s flood defences, a man-made attempt to hold back rising tides. Shot on expired film stock and vintage cameras, the work fractures light and colour, evoking ecological and perceptual instability. The film invites us to see differently, challenging fixed ideas of knowledge, beauty, and survival.

Simon Rattigan’s RiverView echoes these questions through a quietly attentive lens, observing the estuary from an upper-storey window. The film juxtaposes domestic interiority with the industrial river below, capturing fleeting, cyclical rhythms – tidal surges, birds in flight, passing tankers. Through minimal movement and meditative framing, RiverView becomes a vessel for time itself, holding space for reflection and layered observation.

Ritual and performance are woven throughout as modes of remembrance and reclamation. In In Plain Sight: Unseen, artists Beverley Carruthers and Jane Woollatt perform on Two Tree Island, transforming an intertidal zone into a site of visibility and kinship. Their collaborative practice, honed over years, is deeply attuned to the rhythms of both body and land, affirming the political power of intimate transformation.

This sense of the body as both witness and vessel in Jonathan Goldberg’s Cider to the Sea captures an improvised Beltane ceremony on the Isle of Sheppey, where apples, cider, and community offerings flow toward the sea. In Deep in the Eye and the Belly, Sam Williams blends archival and speculative imagery to imagine the whale as both container and threshold – an ambiguous figure of sanctuary, grief, and queer potential.

Themes of mourning and migration ripple across works like Delivering Coffins by Michael Upton and concrete barges by Aislinn Evans, where industrial infrastructures intersect with memory, displacement, and loss. 

In George Morgan’s Awojoh the artist explores Yoruba ritual to channel ancestral memory and spiritual continuity. Awojoh itself becomes both offering and invocation, linking personal practice with collective memory through the intimacy of hand, voice, and vessel.

Threaded throughout is a commitment to ritual as practice and process – repetitive, grounding, and generative. Offerings of rice, kola nuts, cider, blood, and breath recur not as spectacle but as gestures of continuity and care. In different ways, each artist attends to what has been silenced, polluted, or obscured, and proposes ways to feel with and through it.

Together, these works invite us to listen—slowly, sensorially, and across thresholds. What kinds of nourishment remain possible in this ever changing Estuary landscape? And what offerings might still be made?

Dates and running times 

Works shown on loop with a running time of 65 minutes in the following locations: Wat Tyler Country Park, 21-29 June 11am-5pm, and Gravesend Town Pier (21 June 3-5pm and 22 June 1-5pm)

In Plain Sight Unseen by Jane Woollatt and Beverley Carruthers (5 minutes)

Flood Barrier by Catherine Yass (15 minutes)

The Sensory Attunement Coracle by Ryan Powell (5 minutes)

Cider to the Sea by Jonathan Goldberg (3 minutes)

Delivering Coffins by Michael Upton (4 minutes)

RiverView by Simon Rattigan (13 minutes)

concrete barges by Aislinn Evans (6 minutes)

Awojoh by George Morgan (14 minutes)

Deep in The Eye and The Belly (92 minutes) will be shown on a separate screen at the following times and locations:

11am, 1.30pm and 3pm at Wat Tyler Country Park (21-29 June)

2pm on 21 June at Gravesend Town Pier 

12pm and 3.30pm on 22 June at Gravesend Town Pier 

A selection of works from the Estuary Dreams programme will be shown in the following locations:

12.30pm daily at Wat Tyler Country Park (21-29 June)

2pm on 21 June at Gravesend Town Pier

1.30pm on 22 June at Gravesend Town Pier