©Philipp Ebeling In November 2024, we unveiled our latest co-commission cohort, showcasing eleven inspiring projects that will enrich and celebrate six towns along the Thames Estuary throughout 2025. With a mission to empower local voices and showcase grassroots talent, this initiative brings together diverse artists and communities to create art that responds to the region’s unique character, history and potential.
Our co-commission programme aims to change the cultural landscape of the Thames Estuary by working with our Local Authority partners to support the talents of our co-commissions. This not only enhances the artistic landscape of the Thames Estuary but also builds connections that celebrate the area’s rich cultural heritage.
These projects will engage young people and communities from Basildon, Benfleet (and wider Thurrock area), Canvey Island, Chatham, Gravesend and Sheerness through film, installations, workshops, immersive performances, visual arts, story-telling and hands-on experiences. A number of the co-commissions will also take part in Estuary 2025’s ‘Estuary Anthology’ where timings align. With years of experience in the sector, our Senior Producer Jo Hartle will be working to support our co-commissions.
Meet our eleven new co-commissions:
Estuary Dreams is a community experimental storytelling project led by neurodivergent Basildon filmmaker and artist Aaron Shrimpton. Up to 15 participants – emerging artists, recent graduates, or creatives outside traditional paths – will be selected to attend workshops exploring Basildon’s unique narratives.
Under Aaron’s guidance and with support from renowned guest lecturers and artists, participants will create experimental moving image art inspired by their experiences and surroundings. The workshops, emphasising inclusivity and creativity, will cover themes such as environmental impacts, migration, and local industry and culture. Final works are set to be screened at Basildon’s Towngate Theatre, the Estuary Festival 2025, and the Basildon Festival of Moving Image (currently in development). Estuary Dreams, promoted by a range of local partners, provides a platform for diverse voices, breaking down barriers of age, race, and background, while fostering artistic growth and cultural connection.
Telling stories one frame at a time, Animating Education is a dynamic filmmaking social enterprise committed to nurturing the creative aspirations of children and young people. Their mission is simple: to empower the next generation of filmmakers through education, workshops, and hands-on experience.
The team believe that every child deserves to discover their voice. Working with young people attending Yellow Door Youth Group on Canvey Island using stop motion to retell local historical events and personal reflections of the young people living in the area today.
Let’s Play Thurrock! will see Applause Rural Touring collaborate with Record Breaking performance company Casson & Friends (C&F) to locally create and tour a brand-new version of their joyful participatory dance work ARCADE, a high quality & ambitious work that will be developed in collaboration with and performed by an intergenerational cast from the Thurrock area.
ARCADE is an interactive performance that uses movement ‘games’ to animate public spaces – encouraging playful participation to connect people of all ages with the childlike joy of play – and each other!
Developed in collaboration with diverse communities and young people across the region, the project will take place in and around Thurrock, acting as a gentle reminder of the importance and benefits of play, particularly for mental health; and questioning preconceptions around how we use public space, who can play, and how our towns and communities can be improved if we can play better together.
In the shadow of the Thames, a haunting story resurfaces—the tale of the Princess Alice. In 1878, this paddle steamer left Gravesend carrying 800 day-trippers. Near Woolwich, tragedy struck: the Princess Alice collided with a bulk collier, plunging passengers into freezing, sewage-laden waters. Over 600 lives were lost in one of Britain’s worst maritime disasters, a tragedy that has faded from public memory.
The Forgotten Dead brings history to life through immersive performances and installations along Gravesend quayside, transforming these locations into vivid scenes of remembrance, resonating with the legacy of that fateful day. Through workshops, community research, and accessible online content, The Forgotten Dead ensures these lost voices echo across generations, honouring lives and stories almost forgotten.
Blueprint Arts is an arts-based not-for-profit located in Northfleet, who have been producing dynamic & responsive projects with communities for nearly 20 years, delivering inclusive and educational arts experiences across Kent.
Callisto is an AuDHD artist who uses primarily performance and installation work to process and examine the world of emotions and interpersonal interaction.
In 2023, Callisto executed the first iteration of Sightings of Home at the Gravesham Fringe Festival.
House of Stars, led by multidisciplinary artist and creative director Nadia Perrotta, is dedicated to creating immersive storytelling experiences that connect communities through art. Our latest project, New Chronicles of Mudfog, draws on the rich history of Chatham during the Industrial Revolution, blending Charles Dickens’ iconic fictional town of Mudfog with the real stories of migration and innovation that shaped the area. Through a series of hands-on workshops, young people will bring Mudfog’s characters to life, culminating in an original card/role-play game that reimagines historical themes for a modern audience. Featuring an evolving AR installation along Chatham High Street and an interactive game that will tour festivals, schools, and libraries, New Chronicles of Mudfog invites everyone to experience history as an ongoing dialogue about identity, migration, and belonging.
Award-winning company Icon Theatre presents a new outdoor production on the shores of Sheerness, inspired by the impacts of climate change on its people, community and coastline. Directed by Icon’s Artistic Director Nancy Hirst, this captivating new work will be shaped by local voices.
Icon Theatre is renowned for creating immersive, outdoor theatre performances that explore important local stories through bold, visual stagings. Their most recent production, Ghost Ships, staged in a former Royal Navy boathouse, highlighted the untold and forgotten stories of the people who built and sailed the ships of Chatham Dockyard across the globe.
Having worked closely with communities in Sheerness since 2019, Icon is proud to create and stage its next production on the Isle of Sheppey.
It is 300 steps from the main hubbub of Chatham High Street to Sun Pier, with wide views and open skies across the River Medway. This project will create and deliver a new creative programme, with the ambition of incorporating 300 activities, to celebrate the river and this neglected area of Chatham.
Produced in partnership between Sun Pier House CIC and Tiller & Wheel CIC, 300 Steps to the River is a new concept and will launch a creative outreach programme in the lead up to the Festival of Chatham Reach in September 2025.
Sun Pier House CIC (SPH) formed in 2013 to support Medway’s creative industries. Split over 3 floors, SPH is home to a gallery, cafe, staging area, events spaces, Community Hire Space, and 26 studios. Alongside the building, SPH delivers a varied public arts programme.
The soil of Essex surrounds us. It lays beneath our feet and tiny particles are even carried in the air that we breath. It both surrounds us and flows through our veins.
Each day we gradually become more a part of the land in which we live and eventually we will all return to it. This project aspires to develop deeper connections with the local soils that factor into our daily lives by encouraging us to interact with them, forming an intimate connection with the Earth.
Taking palm-sized balls of mud and gradually compacting, shaping, and polishing them; perfect spheres emerge, resembling planetary globes: ‘pocket worlds’ of our own creation.
Sylak Ravenspine is an eco-ink maker and designer. His practice is informed by environmental issues and virtually all his materials are gathered by hand from across Essex, with a strong focus on the East Coast where his studio is located.
A cohort of young people looking to work in the cultural sector will also be recruited to shadow Steve and Producer Victoria, gaining invaluable hands-on experience of working on the day-to-day management of a community engagement project.
Graham Harwood and Matsuko Yokokoji (YoHa) have lived and worked together since 1994. Their work involves the use of art as enquiry into the social and technical most recently within the fields of health, war, oceans and death. YoHa’s inquiry is populated by an interconnection of technical objects and other kinds of bodies as in a clinic, hospital, battlefield or at sea.
