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 12-5pm)
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
In Plain Sight Unseen
In Plain Sight: Unseen is a site-specific film set on Two Tree Island, written, costumed, and performed by long-term collaborators Jane Woollatt and Beverley Carruthers. Filmed by Andy Delaney with an original score by Neil Dyson.
The work begins with a provocation:
What kind of ritual would you create to mark the moment of menopause?
The film is a response to the persistent cultural negativity surrounding menopause. Rather than hide or diminish it, the artists embody its physical and emotional landscape, performing it in relation to the Island’s own: soft silty banks, gullies, and cuts.
Two Tree Island, an intertidal place in the Thames Estuary, becomes both stage and collaborator. Drawing a parallel between the treatment of menopausal women and the exploitation of the Earth, the film positions the Island as a living witness and accomplice.
In Plain Sight: Unseen is part of a decade-long collaborative project of the same name. For ten years, Woollatt and Carruthers have met on the Island, staging impromptu performances to passing dog walkers and birds. They have embodied fury, loss, protest, and kinship - transforming themselves into guardians of the land, walking and watching, in plain sight yet unseen.
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.
Flood Barrier
The Barking Creek Flood Barrier in Barking is a massive structure and the blade-like barrier that is lowered once a month for maintenance comes down like a massive guillotine, seemingly pointing to our collective guilt.
Marking the 70th anniversary of the 1953 flood in Barking Creek that buried the whole of Creekmouth village, the film and community project Flood Barrier carries the weight of local history as well as addressing environmental change.
The film follows the flight paths of birds around the barrier, as they navigate this structure which has been produced by humans whose rubbish is killing them. Gull populations increase as they feed off sewage pollution, and Beckton Sewage Works appears in the background. As well as feeding off insects around the sewage spills, birds absorb and often die from the polluted water. Roding River which flows under the barrier into the Thames has the highest number of ‘forever chemicals’ of any river in England.
Filmed partly from drones flying at precarious angles, the footage reflects the instability of the barrier and the climate crisis. The bird flights were filmed with vintage 16mm cameras and out of date film as a way of conserving energy, and this led to light leaking into the camera and flooding the film with light, which became an analogy for flooding. The light leaks colour the film with intense and unexpected colours. Birds have an extra colour cone compared to humans allowing them to see thousands more colours than us.
Recent scientific research suggests a world that does not have inherent colour, where colour is purely interpretation depending on how the eye is structured. So the vision of a bird, or any animal, is as valid as human vision. Even within species there are variations, and colour blindness is rather colour difference. By analogy we all interpret the world differently, and all human viewpoints are equally valid whatever their experience, ethnicity, age, gender or ability.
If anything is to change environmentally, we need to listen to these diverse voices and pay attention to other species. Climate change has been hastened by the mainstream voice of capitalist interest, most directly by the water companies not putting their profits back into sewage treatment but more generally by industries putting profit before sustainability. So diversity and sustainability are inextricably linked.
For this reason, the participation of Progress Project for neurodiverse teenagers was central to the project through their audio recordings that contributed to the sound track, and their work with colour, challenging the normative point of view through their unique vision.
2023
15’07”
16mm film and digital transferred to digital media
Produced by Create London
Funded by Art Fund, Arts Council England and The Elephant Trust.
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 TVCentre.
The Sensory Attunement Coracle
The Sensory Attunement Coracle is a floating sculpture, inspired by ancient boat building techniques. The piece is experienced from the inside, on your own, through completing a circular journey on a tidal stretch of river. You enter the vessel and are pushed out into the rivers flow as the tide is coming in and are returned to the same spot on the ebb.
As you make your slow and meandering way you give your attention to the river in a merging of movement and thought. You let go of the need to get somewhere and tune in to the shifting sonic environment, to the feeling of your body in space and to a different sense of time. The gentle rocking and weightless feeling of floating helps the passenger slip into this state of perception.
The piece is responsive to the River Roding. It was built on its banks and is made mostly from materials that grow there naturally, primarily hazel and reed. The Roding is London’s third largest river, rising near Stansted Airport and joining the Thames at Barking Creek, but it is not well known due to a lack of access and suffers from multiple sources of contamination. It has the highest level of ‘forever’ chemicals of any river in the country with concentrations 20 times higher than safety limits. It also suffers from the dumping of sewage and high levels of illegal fly tipping due to its proximity to major roads. My piece aims to encourage people to give care and attention to this neglected waterway. Please check out The River Roding Trust who share this aim and run practical volunteer sessions cleaning up the river.
I see the Sensory Attunement Coracle as a ritual object, the centrepiece of an imagined ceremony bringing in the Spring: Each spring a coracle king or queen would be chosen through a lottery and this person given to the river as a symbolic offering. The coracles roof would be adorned with blossom and wild flower, the human offering would then enter the vessel, the roof placed above them and then are pushed out into the water to complete their circular journey: up river in the incoming tide, the ebb bringing them home. I made this journey in the spring of 2023 as the first offering to the Roding and documented the journey in this short film.
Though the work was made on and for the Roding, it is a sad fact that there are no rivers in England that are in good ecological health and so the piece and its aim of encouraging people to give of attention to a river that is in need of care, would be valid for any of the Thames tributaries and really anywhere in the UK.
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.
www.ryan-powell.com @ryanpowellfilms
Cider to the Sea
Sheppey is a unique island off the Kent coast. Here we meet Dr. Albion Grey, a Pagan and lifelong "Swampy" (Sheppey resident) who celebrates Beltaine every year with offerings to the sea. Albion provides an insightful commentary to life on the Thames estuary island.
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 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.
Delivering Coffins
Delivering Coffins (2025) is a short experimental film with music by Adrian Lane. It imagines the train journey taken by coffins, those most final of vessels, dispatched by Count Dracula in Bram Stoker's gothic novel to deliver his pestilence to the city. The book's narrative aside, the film was inspired by the Purfleet location of Carfax House in the novel and Stoker's interest in -and use of -the logistics of journeys and transportation as literary device. It also alludes to the historic use of the Thames estuary as a burial site for waste as well as corpses, and to ongoing notions of the territory as a 'threat' to London as represented in stereotypes such as Essex Girls. The images were taken along three train routes, travelling in different directions and requiring the reversal of some footage, so the journey presented in the work is itself a work of fiction. Delivering Coffins was created as part of the Estuary Dreams workshop programme.
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.
RiverView
A river divides territory and is at once a way in and a way out, where tidal shifts push and pull one's desires to go and explore the beyond, while old loyalties hold onto the past weighing down one's need to escape.
Shot in 16mm, black and white film, echoing artist John Latham’s work Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1971, utilizing in-camera split screen and double exposure to explore ideas of psychogeography and synchronicity.
The Thamesmead estate in South East London was built in 1968 in brutalist concrete architecture and placed at the margins of the city. Named after the river, proclaiming its connection to the heart of the metropolitan centre and out to the rest of the world.
The tower block became synonymous with urban decay, social isolation and the failure of utopian modernist optimism. An aspiration where every home would have a river-view in a multi class society, quickly falls into stark contrast with the image of bleak discordant and plain modular functionalism aligned with the lost ambitions of social housing. Decay follows optimism as memories follow events, as predictable as the tides, yet has also given rise to a second life existing in the creations of film and television.
The book, a material and portable object and a dematerialised metaphor, books were once a repository of certain knowledge and the stability of the past are now shredded into bits scattering thoughts into disintegrating futures with alternating words and world views where renewals flow into the sediments of history.
John Latham’s work Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1971, where he photographed all the pages in stop motion animation, can be seen as prefiguring the common process of digitizing books for online archiving. Latham was closely associated with German artist and political activist Gustav Metzger and his auto-destructive methods of art in the 1960’s. These destructive acts seem to create new relationships with knowledge and to dismantle and re-configure old hierarchies of British society.
These books are fabric bound with rich burgundy, deep blue and gold embossed lettering, encyclopaedias, atlases, dictionaries and legal histories which speak of a time when Englishness was the world of empirical authority. Auto-destructive art used fire and chemicals to transform hierarchies of language, authoring and authority. A reflection of human’s destructive powers to accelerate disintegration processes over nature and culture through a process of re-creation of those destructive actions.
G. C Latham (father of John) a colonial minister for education founded BEKE, an experiment to use mobile cinemas as a means to develop community relations in rural parts of British ruled Africa. The project was a short-lived but hugely influential experiment in filmmaking for African audiences and produced 35 films and, through its travelling mobile cinema van, exhibited these pictures across Africa. This project was recorded in a book The African and the cinema: An Account of the work of the Bantu Educational cinema experiment during the period March 1935 to May 1937,By L. A. Nottcutt and G. C. Latham.
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.
concrete barges
A short walk around Rainham’s Concrete Barges, while listening to the half-functional wind-up information point. You’ll learn all there is to know about the Ford Dagenham wind turbine.
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.
Awojoh : Fusing memory and land with liquid and nourishment
Artist-filmmaker, George Morgan, juxtaposes an Awojoh ceremony in Sierra Leone and Basildon which occurs nearly a decade apart. The Awojoh was to celebrate the life of his grandad, Roger Bamikeh Williams, who he never met but through the offering of libations and nourishment from his daughter, he travelled to grant his blessing by the smashing of a glass.
As a tradition, an Awojoh takes place after the 40th day or the one-year anniversary of a deceased person.
In Sierra Leone, traditional memorials usually take the form of ceremonial practices and offerings to honour ancestors and the deceased.
These practices include preparing rice platters, pouring libations, and offering kola nuts, all of which are intertwined with Sierra Leonean society.
In Essex, the same traditional practices and offerings continue a decade later, not only to honour ancestors and the deceased, but to fuse memory and land with liquid and nourishment.
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.
Deep in The Eye and The Belly
In the present day, a story is unearthed of a whale body that became a world of dinner parties, clandestine sex and mayoral speeches. In a possible future, a group of those-who-were-left-behind (or, those-who-chose-to-stay) have made a home inside the body of a whale. They find themselves contemplating this new world and speculating on the state of things outside – a world ravaged by a climate crisis which they survived by turning to the ocean.
Deep in The Eye and The Belly is an ongoing body of work entwining stories of cetacean bodies with imagined oceanic futures in which these bodies become shelter for humans who returned to the oceans in the wake of climate collapse.
In Chapter One an unseen storyteller recounts the real-life tale of a young blue whale who beached on rocks not far from the city of Gothenburg in 1865. After being violently killed, the whale’s carcass was purchased and preserved by taxidermist August Wilhelm Malm for a dramatic museological display that saw it mounted with its jaw agape, allowing access inside the decorated body. Sometime in the 1930s a couple was found having sex inside the creature, and from then on, the museum decided to only open them up on special occasions, including mayoral speeches and elaborate meals for the wealthy.
Our narrator appears on screen in Chapter Two in an extensive, theatrical monologue, where they recount the tale of climate collapse that led them and others to seek shelter and survival in collaboration with their cetacean kin. Reclining in a cramped, cluttered space and dressed in a sequined, eel-like catsuit, they act as our first introduction to the cast of characters who narrate our possible queer futures. They leave us after Chapter Three in which they appear alone on a watery crossing at an unknown time. Atop a bold red lighthouse, they sing a looping lament for the disappearance of the world’s last whale.
Chapter Four introduces us to a group of characters sat in a boat-like ‘belly of the whale’. One character, adorned in a stripey, jelly-fish like costume, begins to speak. Through their monologue they unpack the fears, hopes, indecisions and possibilities of human and more-than-human bodies on the brink of evolution. They ponder the types of oceanic body they might come to inhabit and think back on life before climate collapse. As they speak, the group around them perform a choreographed sequence of bodily transformations, each exploring different aquatic ways of being, and coming together to support and survive.
The enigmatic dancer from Chapter Four becomes our narrator for Chapter Five. She speaks to the experience of climate collapse and her body’s relationship to the ocean. With her cetacean counterpart, she dies and describes the phenomenon of whale-fall. We travel with her as her body is consumed by ocean dwelling creatures before transforming into a unique ecosystem. The monologue here is a meditation of life, death and resurrection, the body becoming a world.
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).
Artists exploring the idea of vessels in many different forms: as boats, bodies, cameras, rivers, and the medium of the film in a sense holding what might otherwise be lost.
© 2024 Estuary Festival CIC
