Coasts in Mind
Museum of London Archeology

In June 2026, I presented a series of four multi-sensory community art workshops delivered in partnership with the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA) for their Coasts in Mind project, combining beach installations and studio sessions to connect local heritage with creative expression. The workshops, which featured participant-led collaborative beach art and tactile clay sculpting, successfully engaged diverse community members, including Sheppey Matters, and highlighted a strong demand for future heritage-focused creative projects.

A multi-layered exploration of memory, place, and tactile heritage unfolded through a series of four immersive workshops. Bridging the shoreline and the studio, these sessions—held across Sheerness Beach, Warden Bay, and The Criterion Theatre, Bluetown—invited a beautifully diverse cross-section of the community to consider their local landscape.

The journey began with sound, using historical audio archives of the coast to help ground participants in a shared history.

On the beaches, the creative process evolved organically; it became a participant-led choreography of gathering and arranging. This collective alchemy transformed raw, found beach matter into large-scale, abstract installations rich with texture. The resulting pieces invited multiple interpretations—proving that common shoreline debris could be elevated into a profound testament to community collaboration, challenging initial perceptions:
“I thought collecting a load of stuff from the beach… doesn't sound terribly interesting… but then at the end of the day when you saw what we achieved… you thought people are getting the benefit out of it.”
“I came along because my friend didn’t want to come alone, its her thing but I’m really enjoying it .”
“I loved it.”
“A thoroughly enjoyably way to spend an evening.”

Indoors, the collective dialogue shifted into more intimate, personal narratives. With a curated treasury of beach-found objects, the participants were encouraged to consider the origin and journey of the found materials, their composition, previous use and date, and their journey to get to the beach.

The participants wedded raw clay with these coastal fragments to forge unique, tactile sculptures. Using intuitive imagination and gentle prompts, they sculpted pieces that did not just mirror the landscape, but channeled deep emotional and ecological connections to it. The clay became a vessel for localised storytelling and moving introspection:

“I am a Sheppey Blue Tit, when I go to the beach it's my calm place, my reflective place, my happy place.”
“I was inspired by the way the birds use their feet to stomp on the ground over at Queenborough—the egrets. I loved the process of using clay.”
“They're all so different… just goes to show the imagination that’s there.”

By the end of the sessions, the space was filled with highly individualistic forms that everyone was deeply proud of.

With the great take-up and positive feedback, the tides will undoubtedly bring more of these collaborative heritage art events in the future.