Coasts in Mind
Museum of London Archeology
Coasts in Mind - Warden Bay
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.
Coasts in Mind - Sheerness Beach
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
