Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone

Wrecked on the Intertidal Zone is a multi-layered investigative arts project that explores the changing ecology, society and industry of the Thames Estuary.

The project was funded by Arts Catalyst and the Arts Council and was led by artists YOHA, in collaboration with partners from Goldsmiths College, the RCA, Brunel University and the Belton Small Crafts and Boat Club.

This gallery of short films by Alistair Oldham documents some of the different activities of the project and explores the thinking behind it, such as digging a twelve ton forty foot cockle fishing boat out of the mud and turning it into an anti-monument, foraging for food, catching brown shrimp, exploring Canvey Island and Hadleigh Ray, running citizen science workshops, interviewing local author and historian Rachel Lichtenstein and project collaborators the Critical Art Ensemble, and writing an Epitaph of the Common Mud.

As an interactive documentary, the gallery asks how a multilayered arts project that investigates the complexity of the Thames Estuary might best be represented in film. This in turn raises multiple questions about producing, directing and editing across a non linear platform. Although the gallery is designed to be housed online, it has also been used in talks, conferences and exhibitions at Arts Catalyst in London, the Focal Gallery at the University of Essex, and at the Hermitage in St Petersburg.