TOMA, Focal Point Gallery and Metal are embarking on a Creative Break Time, a bold three-year project in collaboration with four Southend schools to explore 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.
By connecting local teachers with artists—both from Southend and beyond—we’re creating dedicated creative time and space for inspiration, collaboration, and peer learning. Our goal is to foster transformative educational practices that benefit not only our city, but the wider educational community.We’re excited to explore a range of art practices that align with the interests of our lead teachers and partner schools. In Year One, our lead artists and educators include nature storyteller Lora Aziz, artist and organiser Emma Edmondson, filmmaker George Morgan and animator Kate Sullivan.
With thanks to Design Print Bind for our new project artwork, featuring illustrations by Emma Edmondson. Creative Break Time is made possible by Freelands Foundation.
Working with is on Creative Break Time, are artists George Morgan, Kate Sullivan, Lora Aziz and Emma Edmonson.
George Morgan
George Morgan is an Artist Filmmaker and educator based in Essex, his creative practice as an artist extends beyond filming and editing, it’s fundamentally driven by his passion to tell untold stories using experimental and traditional filmic tools.
George’s passion for Arts education is evident in both his teaching and facilitation work, he also freelances as a writing facilitator, leads filmmaking projects as part of Essex Visual Arts and previously worked as a qualified secondary school drama and creative media teacher with a BA in Theatre & performance studies and an MA in Acting For Screen from Royal Central School Of Speech And Drama
Kate Sullivan
Kate Sullivan is an experimental filmmaker, animator, and enthusiastic animation workshop facilitator based in Shoeburyness, Essex. She works with UAL Central Saint Martins, Film London, The National Archives, and Focal Point Gallery to encourage people of all ages, abilities, and backgrounds to experiment with animation. She also mentors people on a 1-1 basis, recently helping DYCP grant awardee Megan Metcalf introduce animation into her illustration practice.
Kate’s personal work often takes the form of experimental portraits, which celebrate and are a collaboration with, world-builders, obsessives, enthusiasts and amateurs. Recurring themes (that she is powerless to resist), include animism, and co-authorship with the inanimate.
Lora Aziz
Lora Aziz is a British-Egyptian interdisciplinary artist, nature storyteller, and creative producer whose work explores the connections between intergenerational knowledge, traditional practices, and the natural world.
Emma Edmondson
Emma Edmondson is an artist and organiser from Southend-on-Sea. Studying and graduating during the 2008 financial crash alternative economies, precarity and utopian community are at the centre of her research and practice. She works with sculpture, print, text and education and is interested in how recessions and austerity shape how we survive creatively.
In 2016 she set up TOMA an accessible artist-run education model which is currently the only postgrad-ish level art programme in Essex after all others were stopped by their host universities. TOMA sits outside the traditional institutional model and was born of and been shaped by austerity and the decades long businessification and dismantling of creative education.These are the politics that bought TOMA into existence. Recently she has been processing raw clay dug from the ground and exploring local land rights to create sculptures that sit on the ground they were made from, marking out little know public rights of way to encourage local people’s use of them. She always works collaboratively believing in collaboration over competition and the power of people coming together to change sector policy, systems and rules
