SeaScapes

Listen to our trailer to get a feel for our new podcast. ‘The Ballad of the Crocodile and the Underpass' - Stories of Washington New Town’, is a podcast ballad partnership between Washington Heritage Partnership, We Make Culture, University of Sunderland, Baseline Shift and Arts Centre Washington. Since April 2024 this partnership, podcaster and musician Grace Stubbings and the Washington communit...

Sea Beats took place throughout the summer months of 2022. Musicians Hannabiell Sanders and Yilis del Carmen Suriel (co-founders of Harambee Pasadia) worked with coastal communities and organisation Mental Health Swims across Seaham and Sunderland. Through a series of collaborative music making workshops, they helped foster new connections with the coastline through rhythm and percussion, storytel...

Whitburn Resonance is a community project that focuses on the sounds of the medieval fishing village of Whitburn on the North East coast. The project aims to understand how the local soundscapes have changed over time by combining archaeological data and sonic research. The project emphasises connecting people to the area and encourages reflection on the coastal environment. Through participatory...

Soundmirror is a participatory artwork that listens to and reflects the soundscapes of coastal environments through the sites of First World War sound mirrors in the north east today. The online artwork created by Rob Smith invites people to add to a database of sounds and examines how ‘listening’ to the contemporary coastal environment can enable the site of the sound mirror to emerge from the in...

Sea Change Lab is a series of creative workshops run by three different artists: Dawn Felicia Knox, Tracy Thomas, and Jo Howell. Sea Change Lab explored questions around personal connection to the coast with young people from Horden through sessions focused on visualising and looking in different ways using lo-fi, sustainable photographic techniques. In this episode, we hear from the lead artists;...

Queer Shores and Seas is a creative project engaging with Queer communities and allies across the Northeast, capturing shoreline stories and celebrating our Curious coastal heritage. Lead artist for this project, Lizzie Lovejoy, engaged with over 450 participants through conversations, workshops and performances. They learned and shared stories of our local community from Tyne to Tees, considering...

Coastal Cuisine is a Co/Lab Sunderland project which explores the cuisines of the international communities living in Sunderland and the positive impact that has on the local foodscape. From September 2022 - January 2023, international communities in Sunderland worked with ceramicist Mary Watson and researcher Suzanne Hocknall to explore the positive influence that diverse cultures have on our loc...

Blue Wave is a dance project that seeks to co-create an authentic connection between coastal communities and their natural marine heritage through dance. Blue Wave was co-created with female members of Friends of the Drop in for Asylum Seekers and Refugees (FODI) and Sangini (a BME-led, multicultural women’s arts organisation) and the North East Migration Project (NEMP). The dance project drew ins...

Blast Beach is a multi-media based project based around and informed by interviews with communities who are living around and/or influenced by Blast Beach, Seaham. Over a 6 month period, varying individuals were interviewed to create a documentary that highlights the influence of the coast upon the people who live, and are influenced, by it. In this episode, Geologist David Roberts talks about how...

Be the Sea worked with local coastal communities to explore how we can become more capable of living with and not just on the coast - in ways that are mutually sustainable with fellow human and non-human beings?  The project centred around three methods to foreground listening: Attunement: field-recording activities that zone in on the non-human sounds of the coastal seascape through listenin...