From 2024 to 2027, Focal Point Galley, The Other MA (TOMA) and Metal are working intensively with local school teachers and creative practitioners through a collaborative, creative and active research project, Creative Break Time, exploring how creativity could improve the working lives of teachers.
Artists play a vital role in driving positive social change in Southend—by sharing fresh ideas, sparking conversations, and offering diverse perspectives. Teachers, as the inspiration for the next generation, deserve that same creative freedom and care.
Creative Break Time explores the creative wellbeing of teachers whilst radically providing them with care and creative time to foster inspiration, collaboration, and peer learning. We’re connecting through supportive residencies, artist and teacher-led workshops, teacher-training resources, in-school activities, artist-teacher partnerships and deep hanging out with special guests from educational and creative sectors.
So far, we’ve shared our work at the iJADE 2025 Conference, hosted crits for artists and teachers, gifted 100 limited edition commissions to local school teachers and co-developed new tools to ‘itch the curriculum’. Our co-researchers include teachers from Greenways Primary, Milton Hall Primary, Shoeburyness High and St Bernard’s High School.
Our mission is to bring Southend artists and teachers together in transformative ways and we emphasise care, rest, wellbeing and meaningful collaboration in order to do this. By investing in teachers’ creativity, we want to bring about lasting change in Southend schools across all curriculums and key stages, and foster transformative educational practices that benefit not only our city, but the wider educational community.
For the first year of Creative Break Time we worked with artists George Morgan, Kate Sullivan, Lora Aziz and Emma Edmonson. To build our second cohort of Creative Break Time co-researchers, we asked our lead teachers to select artists to collaborate with from a pool of artists we gathered in our open call. Curiosity played a big part in their decision making and reflecting on individual creative interests and needs, both inside and outside of school.
Through shared residencies, collective making and reflection time, we’re excited to be exploring the creative wellbeing of teachers alongside:
- Anna Lukala, a process-based artist and educator whose work sits at the intersection of photography, ecology, and materiality.
- Graham Burnett, an artist, writer, permaculturist and community practitioner based in south east Essex.
- Ella Johnston, a multidisciplinary artist whose ongoing investigation into mark-making, gesture, and the calligraphic line explores how meaning is constructed, dissolved, or withheld through inscription.
- Nathalie Coste, a French visual artist based in south east London, exploring radical forms of transformation and resistance through sculpture, installation, and participatory gatherings.
Working with independent evaluator Nicky Sim, we’re gathering experiences shared with us throughout this project to build a greater understanding of the joys and challenges of teaching, and the impact of creative connection.
Here’s a live feed of Instagram posts which gathers the findings and experiences of our co-researchers and participants, including teachers, artists and organisations.
Scroll over each image to find out more.
Thanks to Design Print Bind for our project artwork, featuring illustrations by Emma Edmondson. Creative Break Time is made possible by Freelands Foundation.
