After the flush: Exploring the aesthetics and politics of waste/water through creative practice

Artist talk with Bryony Gillard 

Wednesday 27 May, 6:00 – 7:30pm
Turner Contemporary

In this workshop we will embark on reading, watching, writing, listening and creative exercises that expand on the murky topic of wastewater. Wastewater, its management, what it contains, where it goes and who gets access to sanitation, is a pressing contemporary issue. It is a visceral, personal, intimate and often hidden material, yet it is much more than a physical consequence of urban metabolism. In a context where wastewater spills regularly affect beaches across Thanet and recent power outages at water treatment sites affecting local drinking water supplies, this workshop is a space to explore our individual and civic relationships to wastewater through discussion and creative practice.

Bryony Gillard is an artist and PhD Candidate at University of Plymouth. Situated between writing, workshops, performance, moving image and exhibition making, her practice reflects on events, states of being, materials and organisms that refuse or resist normative capitalist structures and temporalities. This might include thinking about grief, sickness or erotic autonomy, engaging with materials such as sewage, seaweed or auto-fiction and working with genealogies of feminist labour that are elusive, messy and entangled in contemporary concerns. 

Her current research uses artists’ moving image to explore wastewater as an aesthetic, metaphor, material and method. Framed by a multi-disciplinary approach to theory and practice, her work asks what wastewater can teach us about bodies, responsibility and care.

Recent projects include a solo exhibition at East Quay, (Somerset, 2026), a commission with Focal Point Gallery (Southend, 2025) and an essay and performance for Mirror Lamp Journal (Dublin, 2025). Her work has been presented nationally and internationally including ESTUARY (Kent), Jerwood Arts (London), Playbill (Amsterdam), Ocean Archive at TBA21 (Venice), Tate St.Ives (Cornwall), and Turf Projects (Croydon). She has an MFA from the Dutch Art Institute and is a Lecturer in MA Fine Art at University of Gloucestershire. 

This event is organised by OSE Associates Ffion Colquhoun-O’Brien, and is part of Towards the Edges, Open School East’s Public Programme 2026 – find more events: openschooleast.org/public-programme-2026