Sea for Yourself
Artist Residencies
Plymouth Culture ran an open call process in summer 2025 to identify three artists in residence for the Sea for Yourself programme.
The residencies are designed to support artists to create work that shines a light on community stories, personal connections to the sea, and the rich heritage of Plymouth Sound, while also providing space for creative exploration and professional development.
We are delighted to announce the artists and provide details of their proposed residencies.
Through My Eyes
Through My Eyes is a contemplative immersive audio experience by Cornish based artists Agnieszka Blonska and Tori Cannell exploring the strong link between sea, migration and motherhood led by the stories and memories of local Polish migrant mothers.
Experienced seated looking out to sea, the work captures the voices and experiences of first generational Polish Migrant Mothers from Plymouth. Originally created with young people in Penzance, the work will be informed by and re-imagined for Plymouth created with local voices. Audiences will be invited to listen to these mothers words, look at the ocean & surrounding areas through their eyes.
Through four participatory workshops, participants will be guided through a process of story-sharing and memory work delving in to their own journeys and personal histories.
Agnieszka Blonska
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Agnieszka has worked in Britain, Poland and across Europe for the last twenty years both as an independent artist and in collaboration with theatre companies and venues such as Wildworks, Powszechny Theatre, Theatre Institute in Warsaw, Desperate Men, DotComedy, Mercurial Wrestler, National Theatre Studio, Soho Theatre, Circomedia, Hall For Cornwall and Theatre Bristol.
As a migrant herself, Agnieszka’s work explores subjects of identity, social change and personal stories in relation to society. Using a variety of forms including participatory and performative theatre.
About the artists
Tori Cannell
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Tori is a theatre-maker, writer and community engagement practitioner. A qualified youth and community worker and trauma-informed practitioner, she brings a person-centred approach to her creative practice, shaped by listening and collaboration.
Her work spans participatory theatre, writing, audio and live events, and is rooted in working alongside communities to create spaces where people feel safe to share their stories.
She is currently creative arts lead at Trelya. Alongside this, she works as a freelance director, creative producer and writer with organisations including Wildworks, The Writers’ Block, Hall for Cornwall, The Minack Theatre and Scary Little Girls.
Mount Batten Project
Artist Kayla Parker is collaborating with the film-maker Stuart Moore to create a 360 film focused on the heritage and natural and built environment of the Mount Batten peninsula, where the River Plym flows into the northeast of Plymouth Sound.
Kayla and Stuart are working with children and staff at Hooe Primary Academy along with members of Old Plymouth Society, a local history group. The intergenerational film responds to their and others’ experience and memories of the peninsula.
Art curator Edith Doove commented: “Parker’s and Moore’s working method is a kind of close reading of their subject and an immediate interaction with it.”
‘Hidden Sounds and Histories of the River’, Bureau Doove, 2014.
Mount Batten was a significant trading port with Continental Europe during the late Bronze Age. The Artillery Tower and the flying boat hangars are visible reminders of Mount Batten’s strategic role in the defence of Plymouth from Medieval times until the recent past. The South West Coast Path loops around the peninsula passing important locations for water sports – marinas, the Mount Batten Centre and a sand and rock beach, popular with swimmers and families. After the First World War, Mount Batten became a Royal Air Force station and the area was closed to the public. Towards the end of the 20th century, the RAF station closed and the modern development of the site began – people can once again enjoy the peninsula.
Kayla Parker
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Kayla Parker is an artist film-maker and writer working with material and digital film, including 360. Her current practice centres on rivers, estuaries and coastal zones, focused on the natural environment, with place as an archive of memory. Her early body of work emerged from dreams, often drawing on the family archive to explore mother-daughter relationships, feminine subjectivity and gender.
Kayla’s films are exhibited internationally, with commissions from the Arts Council, the British Film Institute and broadcast TV, and are held in many international archives and collections, such as the BFI National Archive.
You can find out more about Kayla’s work here.
About the artists
Stuart Moore
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Stuart Moore is a film-maker and sound artist who makes single, multiple screen and 360 films. His research investigates our relationship to place, landscape and memory. He is an accomplished sound artist and an experienced cinematographer, having worked professionally on television wildlife and natural history series.
His short films are shown worldwide, with recent screenings at LÁ Art Museum, Iceland, Glasgow Centre for Contemporary Art, and C.A.R. Contemporary Art Rhur, Germany. His Super 8 film Sea Front, celebrating youthful rites of passage, won the London Short Film Festival Trick of the Light Award for its outstanding cinematography, and the trophy for the best Independent Film at the Media Innovation Awards.
Let’s Sea Your Tatts
Plymouth based artists LOW PROFILE & Laura Hopes are making a new project celebrating the city’s deep connection to the sea.
For centuries, tattoos have linked land-dwellers with the sea. Maritime and nautical tattoos have carried layers of meaning and significance for those whose skin they adorn, and others who see them.
The artists are inviting people with a connection to Plymouth to share photos of their maritime, nautical and sea related tattoos and the stories behind them and holding free creative workshops to design new tattoos.
Low Profile
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Low Profile are artists Rachel Dobbs and Hannah Rose. They live and work in Plymouth, and have been working together in collaboration since 2003.
They are most interested in the connections between people, and creating new experiences that happen in people’s real life. They use things like bold statements, text, badges, sound, temporary gatherings, and event-structures to help them do this.
They make art that is designed to be encountered in social situations, public spaces and become part of people’s everyday. They work hard to make these encounters hopeful, engaging, joyful and thought-provoking.
They regularly work with organisations across the UK, and on self-initiated artworks that shift in scale, format and medium depending on context.
In their artworks, they find ways to create human-to-human connection, temporary communities, collective experiences or situations that get people thinking about their own role as an individual who is part of a group (feeling part of something larger than themselves). They celebrate the strength of coming together, commarardie, resourcefulness, resilience, generosity, loyalty and not giving up.
They are interested in shifting and flattening hierarchies and drawing attention to situations where people butt up against rules, authority, systems of decision-making and power.
They often bring people into their work as participants, collaborators & experts in their field, where their involvement is highly valued & carefully considered.Find them on Instagram & Facebook via @hellolowprofile.
About the artists
Laura Hopes
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Laura Hopes is an artist and researcher whose research focuses on the relationship between land and people.
Her work is open to collaboration and tries to use and reimagine byproducts, found archives or discarded materials. Through extensive collaboration within the collective Still Moving, and with experts in diverse fields, her expanded practice encompasses writing, conversations, film, performance, installation and multi-disciplinary exchange.Find her on Instagram via @laurahopes and more of her previous work here.
…and breathe
and breathe is a new project by Cornwall based artist Megan Roberts, exploring how time spent by and in the sea can support mindfulness, wellbeing, and stress relief.
This is a 4-week community workshop programme for over-55s, culminating in an immersive film installation in the Market Hall’s 360-degree dome in Plymouth.
Through guided conversations and creative activities, participants are invited to reflect on the pressures they face - from work demands and family responsibilities to social isolation and feeling overwhelmed. The workshops create space for personal insight, empathy, and shared understanding.
As part of the project, the group will visit Devil’s Point, a wild coastal site with deep local ties, to record footage and sound that will shape the final film. The project encourages participants and audiences alike to consider how the sea can become a regular, restorative part of life.
About the artist
Megan Roberts
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Megan Roberts is a filmmaker and artist whose practice is driven by principles of collaboration and co-design. She believes that the path to a fair and equitable future lies in moving away from paternalistic systems of control that concentrate power and representation in the hands of a few.
Her participatory filmmaking amplifies marginalised voices and addresses urgent social and environmental issues through close partnerships with communities, researchers, and advocacy organisations.
Her recent three-screen film, In Conversation with Plymouth Hoe, created for The Box’s Re-Imagining the Film Archives programme, is a defining example of her practice.
Developed in response to the anti-immigration riots of 2024, the work layers archival footage with contemporary interviews to explore how public space in Plymouth is shaped and reclaimed through power, class, civic joy, and shared memory.
Other projects include a celebratory film with Devon and Cornwall Refugee Support, marking 25 years of work with displaced communities; documenting the outcomes of Plymouth University’s Routes to Wellness project, which trained peer support workers with lived experience to support refugees and asylum seekers; a documentary made for 99p Films exploring local responses to the sewage crisis in Falmouth; and a film with Say No to LNG interrogating the shipping industry’s greenwashing of liquefied natural gas as a sustainable solution.
Megan’s work centres civic joy as a necessary tool for building resilient communities.
Exploring the intersections of power, class, and representation, she seeks out spaces where collective care and resistance thrive. Through film, she challenges dominant narratives that scapegoat and divide, contributing instead to inclusive, compassionate conversations that support meaningful social change.
These projects have fuelled her desire to move beyond traditional documentary into expanded, participatory, and installation-based approaches to filmmaking - centring communities as co-creators rather than subjects.
Sea for Yourself is being led by Plymouth Culture in partnership with Plymouth City Council and Plymouth Sound National Marine Park. The programme development and delivery is supported by key partners including The Box, Real Ideas, Arts University Plymouth, University of Plymouth and Theatre Royal Plymouth. Sea for Yourself is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and Arts Council England Place Partnership Fund.
