SCREEN SOUTH'S
DIGITAL HUB
SHOWCASE ARTISTS
Screen South’s Showcase Artists are a cohort of ten creatives receiving bespoke support to bring their projects to completion. Their projects span art forms, whether visual, auditory, immersive, or a combination.
Adam Chodzko
Adam Chodzko is a visual artist based in Whitstable, Kent. He works across media, exploring our conscious and unconscious behaviours, social relations and collective imaginations through artworks created as speculative forms of ‘social media.’ His work wonders; Through vision, how can we be?
Adam has exhibited extensively in international solo and group exhibitions since 1991, including: Tate Britain, Tate St. Ives; Raven Row, Museo d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; The Benaki Museum, Athens; Istanbul and Venice Biennales etc. Commissions include Creative Time, (NY); Frieze, and the Wellcome Trust. Awards include: the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Art – New York, AHRC Research Fellowship, DACS Art360.
He’s lectured/tutored at art schools including Central Saint Martins, Chelsea, Slade, Goldsmiths, RCA, Sheffield Hallam and more.
Adam is currently developing his practice-based PhD at Leeds Beckett University, creating an AI tool to translate a community’s nocturnal dreams into visual animations for them; The Dreamshare Seer.
Adam's work as a Showcase Artist
Adam Chodzko will complete a concluding video artwork – ‘The dream of the island’ – arising from his recently launched, live creative AI project which turns descriptions of nocturnal dreams into visual animations. The Dreamshare Seer is a new, free, participatory project, initially created with and focused on the inhabitants of the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, UK. But it’s dream visualiser can also be explored by anyone! Devised by Kent-based visual artist Adam Chodzko, working collaboratively within The Dreamshare Seer group, this unique project began by inventing a tool. The tool uses generative Artificial Intelligence to visualise and animate – through text to image diffusion models – the extraordinary imaginations of an entire community, as manifested through their nocturnal dreams and then described by them through simple storytelling processes, using home computers or smartphones. Through this interaction we hope to activate, democratise and make accessible the amazing, involuntary, nocturnal creativity of dreaming.
Anna Braithwaite
Anna Braithwaite is an innovative and flexible artist working in music theatre and sound art with a strong focus on socially engaged work and improvisation. Her music has been performed at the Royal Opera House, National Theatre, Electric Medway Festival, on BBC Radio 3, Resonance FM and Radiophrenia. She has worked for The Marlowe Theatre and RSC as a community artist. She is currently creating: Green Woman, a residency based theatre show about English folk and an animation sound track which examines social housing initiatives of the 60s.
Anna's work as a Showcase Artist
Pilgrimage: A commission for the 2025 Deal Festival, Pilgrimage explores the experience of walking alone and what it means to be a modern pilgrim. It uses field recordings taken during a three day walk along the Kent coast from Deal to the Cathedral City of Canterbury. It includes outdoor sounds as well as improvised performances captured in churches along the route. Anna is working with Screen South to develop these recordings into a ten minute 360 degree sound work. The piece will be exhibited at the Landmark centre, Deal, Kent, UK on the 11th to the 13th of July 2025. On the 11th of July, there will be a chance to meet the artist as she introduces the installation followed by a Q&A, details of which can be found here.
Anna Braithwaite and Gavin Roberts from Screen South will be hosting an Immersive Sound Taster Session on Sunday the 13th of July using simple plugin E4L within Ableton Live to manipulate sound around the 360° rig. No previous experience is necessary to take part in this hands-on, practical session but some knowledge of using a DAW would be beneficial. All equipment will be provided. Pay what you can, please sign up for your place here.
Carole hayman
Carole Hayman is a Writer, Producer & Presenter. She was born in Kent, which has featured in her trilogy of novels, “The Warfleet Chronicles“. Her early work was with The Bristol Old Vic, The Royal Court and Traverse Theatres, from which she went on to become a founder member and first woman director of the Joint Stock Theatre Company.
She was an Associate Director of The Royal Court Theatre, for which she directed many World Premieres. Carole writes for radio, television and film. On radio, she is well known as writer of the Radio 4 hit series “Ladies of Letters” with Prunella Scales and Patricia Routledge, which has run for twelve series on radio and three series on ITV . Most are available as books, audio books and DVDs. Her latest novel, Legacy, an intelligent, provocative #MeToo mystery, is available on Audible.
Carole has published and broadcast many short stories and pieces of cultural journalism, including features for the Independent, the Guardian, the Express, The Sunday Times, The Mail and a regular column for The Saturday Independent, “My Lofty Life ’ a short animated film based on the column, was made with an award from the UK Film Council. It has appeared in film festivals world wide and is currently available on Vimeo & YouTube. Carole’s political satire novel, Hard Choices, was published in 2003 by Aurora Metro Press and immediately short-listed for The Silver Booker prize for Wit. It was re-published in 2015 by PenSup Publishing.
Carole was an Arts & Humanities Research Council Fellow @ Kings College London, where she made a study on Women & Serial Killers. Called ‘No One Escapes’ this became a highly acclaimed 4 Screen Video Installation. This, funded by Wellcome, was shown in the Brighton Festival @ Fabrica Gallery and all over the UK in high, medium and low secure units, Universities, NHS facilities, forensic and arts conferences and prisons. Carole has recently completed a factual book based on her experiences while making NOE. The Hive her first Opera, loosely based on the material was very well received at The Arcola Theatre’s Grimeborn Opera Festival Summer 2016 and at Tête à Téte’s Opera Festival Summer 2017. Carole has now embarked on her second – The Rotters Opera – a contemporary take based on scurrilous goings on in her home town of Deal during the late 19th century.
Carole runs regular literary workshops and salons and teaches creative writing at UAL – LCC, Leeds Becket and Northampton Universities. She is a regular contributor to the BBC as a writer and presenter. For the BBC she has made many dramas and series and a number of documentaries, including ‘Inside the Unit’ broadcast in 2015. She is currently making a series of podcasts about an inner city in the 80s, co-written with Sue Townsend and adapting one of her own crime novels for television.
carole's work as a Showcase Artist
The deep and peaceful quiet of Lossenham is instantly apparent as you walk the fields – the wide, green vistas bordered by tranquil waterways, offering their own calm comfort with swans serenely gliding by. The history of spiritual devotion, the ancientness of the trees and castle tolls, the cyclical rhythm of farming, the re-wilded reed beds and waterways, make this landscape feel unique; it’s special and very appealing – rich as it is in buried stories.
The Soundscape is an impressionistic patchwork made up of the sounds of the archaeological dig of a 13th Century Carmelite Priory, the fields, the animals and birds, the busy villages, the farm machinery, the church, the hooting single track train, the pub’s gossip, the nearby market, the imagined chatter of the past, the ghostly voices of the Carmelites, their echoing plainsong, their liturgical chants – and the people, past and present, involved in creating it all …
With a team of experienced interviewers, Carole Hayman talked to and recorded the stories and views of upwards of 30 people , all living on and working the land and surrounding villages. The result is a rich patchwork of the countryside views, politics, attitudes and narratives.
The spoken words are interspersed with the sounds of nature and of the wild life supported by the fields, meadows, pastures, ponds, reeds, copses, waterways and banks of Lossenham. While listening, participants can watch screens showing a slow photographic revolve of the land, the people and the creatures, wild and tame, within it. The whole experience is accompanied by musical extracts chosen to add to the serene, meditative, atmosphere.
Catherine Hoffmann
For 25 years Catherine Hoffmann has worked with performance as her main practise. She has an MA with distinction in Creative Writing and is published with LADA and Unbound books. She is regularly funded by ACE and supported by the British council. Catherine takes an interdisciplinary approach to her work using text, music, choreography, video and participation – usually with absurdism she tackles autobiographical material to shine a light on social issues. She ventures into vulnerable terrain using humour and irreverence as a tool, to open up dialogue, embracing the desire for collective healing in our challenging contemporary lives. She shows in festivals, theatres, art galleries, cabarets, bars and clubs throughout the UK and Europe. She toured ‘Cyst-er Act’ to Germany, Edinburgh festival and the Southbank centre in 20219-2021. In 2017/18 the UK with ‘Free Lunch with the Stench Wench’ – a solo exploring shame in relation to class and poverty.
Claudius Fanusie
Developing a transdisciplinary practice across architecture, art, music and computation using both traditional and digital tools and processes. My childhood experiences from Freetown as well as my Black British lived experiences provide the social and political contextualising of my creative exploration. Artist Residencies 2023 & 2024 Residency at Berlin Art Institute where I developed analogue prototypes to explore how MR could be part of my traditional drawings. Residency at UCA Brewery Tap Gallery where I developed work exploring colonial legacies and history of Folkestone’s links to the Trans-Atlantic slavery. Screen South Showcase Artists Program, Folkestone, 2024 My practice was selected for technical assistance to integrate immersive audio with my drawings. Awards 2023 & 2024 Arts Council’s DYCP grant to investigate the use of technology in my drawings. Hi3 Network Award for exploring the use of emergent technologies in dealing with colonial legacies.
claudius' work as a Showcase Artist
The project is a synthesis of immersive audio using game engine technology with my traditional pleinair drawings. The drawings are mainly executed in the public domain and incorporate interactions with the public thereby taking on aspects of street art, public art and social practice. Some of these interactions are also fed into the audio production pipeline One of the drawing and audio takes on even more of a collaborative role and started indoors with members of Folkestone’s Nepalese Community before it was taken outside where locals who interacted with me also contributed to the piece.
craig gell & astrid goldsmith
Craig Gell is a sound artist and composer, exploring our relationship with the natural environment through field recordings, geoscience data and creative coding, and producing multimedia installations, interactive apps, and electroacoustic music. Previous exhibitions include SALT+EARTH Festival, Profound Sound, Folkestone Triennial and Ramsgate Festival of Sound, and broadcasts on Radiophrenia, Resonance Extra and The Lake (DK). In 2021, he was MagiC Carpets (EU) resident artist in Folkestone. Craig is an experienced musician, and has created music for short animated films. Astrid Goldsmith is an award-winning animation writer-director. Specialising in puppet stop-motion, Astrid’s films examine the impact of man on nature through the lens of animal allegory. In 2018, Astrid was selected for the BFI / BBC4 Animation talent scheme. Quarantine, her film about Morris-dancing badgers, won the Best Animated Film Award at LSFF and was the third most-watched free film on BFI Player in 2020. Astrid’s latest film Red Rover won Best Animated Film at Sitges 2020, and was subsequently Oscar long-listed. In 2022 she won the Observer/Jonathan Cape Award and is now writing her debut graphic novel, due to be published by Jonathan Cape in 2026.
craig & astrid's work as Showcase Artists
The Folkestone Elephant is an immersive journey through the local countryside, part of the Kent Downs. Along the way participants will discover archive video footage, learn of fascinating facts and strange tales through the ages, as they try to piece together the myth of the Folkestone Elephant. The web-based app uses the A-Frame (aframe.io) framework, and is designed for mobile operating systems, with an alternative VR version accessible through desktop browsers. We are using photogrammetry to generate 3D assets from physical props, and creating animated sequences and digital puppetry in Blender.
Leah Thorn
Leah Thorn is a spoken word poet, fashion and climate activist, workshop facilitator and speaker. Working in collaboration with filmmakers, her award-winning poetry films have been screened at feminist, poetry and eco film festivals internationally. Leah has extensive experience of leading poetry and expressive writing workshops nationally in arts venues, mental health facilities, women’s groups, community settings, schools and prisons. In 2012 she undertook a Winston Churchill Travel Fellowship, visiting women’s prisons across the United States with theatre companies. In 2013 she received a Royal Society for Public Health Special Commendation Award for her contribution to Creative Arts and the Criminal Justice System. Her latest project, ‘a:dress’, is a campaign of art/activism using textile art, poetry, film and conversations to raise awareness about fast fashion and its contribution to climate crisis.
leah's work as a Showcase Artist
Leah’s short film, ‘Marinade’, is her personal take on being white, Jewish, marinated in the racism of 1950s England and committed to change. Combining spoken word poetry and autobiographical storytelling,animation andSuper 8 footage, ‘Marinade’ delivers an honest and tender exploration of the intertwining of Second Generation identity, racism and antisemitism.The film has been submitted to international film festivals and has been screened so far by the Folkestone Documentary Film Festival and the Warsaw Jewish Film Festival.The film will also serve as a resource to spark conversation about creative approaches to anti-racism in workshops Leah leads for white people.
livi wilmore
Livi is a digital artist and XR developer from North Wales. Her practice revolves around using mixed reality and immersive technology to showcase lost histories, enhance storytelling and challenge the way people see the world around them, often using satirised personifications of day to day phenomena. Livi is currently exploring the uncanny valley (the psychological phenomenon that describes the feeling of unease that people experience when something is almost human, but not quite) in the context of the current fast-paced digital renaissance and the anxieties it brings.
livi's work as a Showcase Artist
In this alt-reality immersive experience combining physical installation and AR, users get to experience a world that’s unsettling in its familiarity. Set late at night at the self checkout of a corner shop named Cache Converters in a district called Uncanny Valley, visitors will get to experience a slice of life in this alternative reality whilst learning from a sympathetic rebellious AI about how our real societies technological advancements has affected our minds ability to process in the age of Information Overload.
Magz Hall
I am a sound artist who works in the UK and Internationally, my sound and radio art is often across platforms from installations to micro broadcasts, live streams, on demand, podcasts and broadcasts. My work spans art the art for the environment, radio art, expanded radio, expanded sculpture and wireless technology across the spectrum and have resulted in works such as Tree Radio for YSP and Transmission Spores as part of the Ash Archive. I am currently developing a series of expanded and immersive sound art and radio works around air pollution and landfill which have developed out of my Radio Air Garden Project. I was awarded a highly commended Oram Award in 2021. My radiophonic installation and poem Waves of Resistance commissioned for Galway 2020 was nominated for an Ivor Novello in Sound Art and Tree Radio at Yorkshire Sculpture Park 2015 was nominated for a BASCA in sound art. I completed a practice-based PhD ‘Radio after Radio, Redefining Radio Art in light of new media technology through expanded practice’ at CRISAP Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice at UAL. I’m always open to collaborations and commissions.
magz' work as a Showcase Artist
This is a pressing immersive radiophonic journey sharing the personal accounts of those living next to Walley’s Quarry a Landfill in Newcastle-Under-Lyme, run by Red Industries who breached its permit over 111 times and caught fire this summer. After over a decade of complaints from local people and members of action group Stop the Stink, Walley’s Quarry legacy will live on. Unfortunately, it’s the tip of the iceberg of a national scandal caused by current legislation, regulation and management of landfill in the UK and with that the legacy of air and water pollution left behind. In Oct 2024 it was found emissions of hydrogen sulphide emitted from the site had been under recorded by the EA between 2016 and 2023, in Oct 2024. Newcastle-under-Lyme Borough Council took legal action against the firm and finally the EA took action to close the site in Dec 2024, however the stench continues as they cap it off and deal with the mess. New research shows landfill leachate treatment, which is the water cleaning process at such sites is creating and increasing banned PFAS chemicals substances into UK water table, all hugely concerning. The artist Magz Hall became aware of a growing national scandal after experiencing the stench from Shelford landfill Canterbury during lockdown, it led me to research this site and others which I also aim to document in the future. She hopes the work will give a voice to some of the many people and communities directly affected by landfills built far too close to homes and allow the audience to experience what it’s like to be gassed in your home on a daily basis. Artist, Producer Interviews and field recording Magz Hall Music Mieko Shimizu Engineer Gavin Roberts
michelle o'callaghan
Michelle is a local Folkestone-born artist and designer. She loves using past design elements to create engaging, quirky and exciting designs. Michelle enjoys creating AR that blurs the lines between reality and dreams. Her artwork is fun, engaging and imaginative. Her recent art commissions include ‘Folkestone Dreams’ AR Installations exhibited in Folkestone Brewery Tap in December 2024, and more recently ‘Folkestone Psychedelic Dreams’ AR installation as part of the Noel Redding Exhibition displayed at Folkestone Museum. With her passion for past art and design with a contemporary twist, Michelle plans to launch her own design business ‘All the Decades’ in 2025.
michelle's work as a Showcase Artist
‘Folkestone Psychedelic Dreams’ is a hyper-colourful digital art piece inspired by the passion and energy of Noel Redding’s amazing 1960s experiences and his life in Folkestone. Noel Redding is a local music legend and was an original member of the famous Jimi Hendrix Experience, one of the leading rock bands of the late 1960s. My digital art piece has 2D photo and 3D elements, creating a series of interactive animated postcards, each a snapshot of Noel Redding’s life in Folkestone, from his birth at The Royal Victoria Hospital to the present-day community space Noel’s Yard. This art piece celebrates the local musical legend Noel Redding and raises awareness of Folkestone’s musical heritage and the need for a statue of Noel Redding in Folkestone.
rebecca marshall
I am a filmmaker and moving image artist who creates evocative, poetic, and contemplative films exploring time and human connection. My work has a haptic, experimental approach, blending documentary and fiction. I use philosophical questions and personal narratives to offer space for attention to spectacular visions of everyday life. My current project ‘The Strangeness of Seeing Immersive’ (SOSi) with Nichola Bruce, experiments with bringing together film, new technology, science and philosophy to explore our subjective experiences of perception as a VR landscape of the mind. The processes of perceiving the world are broken down to become both an inward and outward journey, full of mutual questions and renewed wonder. SOSi is about exploring what it is to be in the world as a human being.
rebecca's work as a Showcase Artist
Strangeness of Seeing Immersive explores our everyday perceptual experiences of attempting to relate to the world and each other. From visions seen with closed eyes, through blinking, crying and daydreaming, SOSi aims to make the processes of perceiving the world into an engaging and immersive journey full of questions and vivid wonder.SOSi builds upon a sketchbook of twenty-six moving-image film-poems created by Nichola Bruce and myself as an exploration of our own subjective experiences of perception. Our showcase week (Electro Studios, Hastings, January 11th and 12th) will be an opportunity to come and see our moving image experiments and tell us what visions you see with closed eyes. How do you experience after-images, dream-images, memories, floaters? We will explore how to make a sensory VR journey that lifts philosophical ideas off the page into a bodily experience.
Symoné
I’m Symoné, an alternative game designer and interdisciplinary artist based between London and Kent (UK) and Washington DC (USA). My journey as a creator is multifaceted, intersecting between circus performance, cabaret, alternative theatre, videogames, and digital arts. With a Guinness World Record to my name I have experience with clients such as La Soirée, the Royal Opera House, and Sony as a circus performer. As a creative director, I create small to medium-scale productions that blend circus, theatre, and digital media to explore the intricate relationships between the body, movement, and storytelling. Apart from creating my own productions, cultivating spaces for people of color is important to my practice. I’m the creative director for Uprising, an artistic residency programme for artists of the Global Majority, supported by Jerwood Arts.
Central to all my practices is to explore storytelling with and about the body and queering art. I am a graduate at the School of Oriental and African Studies (BA Anthropology) and a graduate at game development academy Code Coven.
Symoné's work as a showcase artist
A Dream Within A Dream is a glitchy sensorial mixed reality experience – part road trip video game, part durational video installation piece – that plunges audiences into a world of glowing screens and pulsing immersive sound. As the journey gradually reveals itself, a new space is opened up for reflecting on identity, the body, memories, and dreaming.
This artistic journey explores the intersection of live performance and videogames. Inspired by games like Before Your Eyes, The Stanley Parable, and Trek To Yomi. The artists used techniques from “immersion psychology” within ADWAD. The experience explores concepts of free will and self-discovery through gaming, prompting participants to question choices and confront merging narratives. ADWAD is a contemplation on the intersection of roleplay and the body, and an inquiry into the possibilities and consequences of erasing memories and constructing a new narrative for the future.
