TRANSMISSIONS: Interdisciplinary Artist Development through Sound and Performance
When the present is indescribable, how do we describe ourselves?
In 2025, we were awarded funding from The Royal Society of Literature as part of their Literature Matters award for creating artistic projects with/for under-represented audiences in the UK. We partnered with WORD! Poetry, LCB Depot and Leicestershire Partnerships Trust to use this funding to develop relationships with eight early career writers based in the East Midlands to create TRANSMISSIONS – an immersive soundscape using poetry and live performance, curated by Tom Heath and Lydia Towsey.
Transmissions is about translating space and experience through sound and collaborative practice, but also about providing tangible, sustainable benefit to new artists from regional and marginalised creative spaces. Art is collaborative and communal, and should reflect the communities it serves.
Take a look below to access TRANSMISSIONS! We’d love to hear your feedback and thoughts as we continue to develop the project moving forward with our artists.
CLICK HERE FOR OUR TRAILER
TRANSMISSIONS
We feel incredibly lucky to be able to work with these amazing artists and partners. TRANSMISSIONS shows the importance of fostering connection, promoting access to creativity and paying attention to new artistic voices. Space, time and financial support are valuable resources and so should be attributed where they are needed most – broadcasting new stories, and new narratives.
All people, all creative x
The Project
We encouraged artists to use a fundamental, visceral element which they have no experience with i.e. sound. We supported them in allowing it to inform their work to it’s full potential through workshops and studio space. We wanted to offer the very rare commodity of space to explore and develop, providing financial support to reduce barriers to accessing creativity.
Over the course of September 2025, we worked with these new writers at The Leicester Creative Hubs Depot to record audio soundscapes and immersive layers for their work. We’ve used these spaces to create a mini-community hub. This was used for the delivery of workshops on using sound in live performance, as well as offering open access for the artists to experiment, record, re-record and do what they do best. Whether it being a new performance piece, or a chat over tea and coffee.
For us, this amazing project is only the first phase of TRANSMISSIONS. We are actively working to extend it’s capabilities for further cohorts of artists – looking at both funding and operational support.
We want to develop our ideas to a greater extent in collaboration with other organisations, spaces and creatives across all mediums. If you’re interested in a conversation about supporting TRANSMISSIONS in any capacity, or would like a copy of our full evaluation report of the project – then feel free to get in touch at stghostycreatives@gmail.co.uk
The Team
Contributing Artists: Ashanti Wenham Charlotte Richardson John Constantinou Kevin Turner Mandeep Singh Romeo Shirley Fifield Sonia Wood
Creative Producer – Tom Heath Co-curator – Lydia Towsey Assistant Producer – Faizah Ahmed Technical Coordinator – George Gray Sound Design – Tom Heath, CATHALLA
“TRANSMISSIONS has helped me feel like a professional artist, I feel confident and ready for what’s next”
“There’s a real warmth about the (project) space, and that’s hard to find anywhere else”
“Really enjoyed being able to record my work, it’s different to anything I’ve ever done before.”
SUNRISE: – Blind and Vision Impaired Artists in Creative Sectors
Every day in the UK, 250 people start to lose their sight. About 285 million people are vision impaired worldwide: 39 million are blind and 246 million ‘low vision’ – a term noted as the mean definition for most of the largest global medical associations. It is, like so many others real term factors of life, much more common than broadcast discussions would have you believe. Our urban structures, cities and infrastructure are set up in a way to create the idea of disability as a disadvantage.
Blindness and Vision Impairment is part of a conversation that should be dominating global, or at least urban, discourse. It should be the priority of every business, the panicked mission of every local authority and the responsibility of us as a collective group of individuals – especially when it comes to accessing creativity. In the same way that disability is fundamental to our social identity as a diverse populous, so too should access be fundamental to creative and artistic practice.
The simple reality is that we allow this to be the case.
We received funding across 2021-2022 from Arts Council England as part of their Developing Your Creative Practise allocations to enter into a period of research into creative access for Blind and Vision Impaired artists, attempting to build relationships on a national basis to look at how access for Blind and Vision Impaired practitioners can be improved. We are very fortunate to have worked with so many incredible people and artists who have help to both educate us, and challenge us.
While the period of research was primarily for our own benefit in the work we create and the people we support, we nonetheless wanted to create some tangible support from it that could be accessed by others. As a result, we have committed to creating audio guides, pre-performance tours and contrast documents to every piece of work we share or create as a collective. Likewise we’ve compiled our own list of resources for making your content more accessible, as well as resources for Blind and Vision Impaired artists feeling daunted at the start of their artistic journey who may be seeking support. These can be found here, in our resources section.
We’ve also included a brief summary of some of the most common things you can do to make your online presence and work more accessible, as a generalised approach, in the summary article we wrote upon completion – which you can also access here.
Thank you to every organisation and individual that gave us time to work with them over the past year. It has been hugely rewarding and one of the biggest projects we’ve undertaken so far. We have credited each one on our resources page, and would highly recommend getting in contact yourself as a creative if you need similar support for your work.
DAIKANNON: an International Surrealist Collaboration
Between 2022-2023, DAIKANNON was a collaboration between non-professional or early career poets across the UK and US to create a 3 part digital poem, an triptych – the exquisite copse.
Exquisite Copse is something you’ve probably done in your first ever school. You fold paper over three times and get one person to draw the head of a character, another to do the torso and someone else to finish off with the legs. Usually what you end up with was an, albeit slightly disturbing, but hilariously silly character.
One of the most famous uses of this technique artistically was during the original European Surrealist resurgence in 1920s Paris – although the technique has been sighted in countless other cultures hundreds of year before, particularly throughout Mexican, Venezuela and large parts of East Asia. Artists would create pieces based on the inputs of multiple practitioners, all without knowing what the others had done – or instead using the last person’s work as inspiration for their own.
The result is creativity that is collaborative, but doesn’t rely on formal processes. Rather than being obsessed with structural art as the be all and end all of creativity (as great as it is) – we prefer to understand creativity on a level that is accessible to anyone, regardless of their experience or knowledge. The process was automatic, immediate and raw – exploring inner city life, excess, addiction and medical trauma. DAIKANNON became a space to explore that which could not be expressed through conventional means.
Made exclusively through contributions from St Ghosty Subscribers – compiled and edited from the works on 6 poets across 2 continents who all had no previous experience in arts or creativity aside from their own thoughts, DAIKANNON remains one of our most memorable projects. Since then each of our contributors (see below) has gone on to continue their development in the arts and creating – but importantly – sharing their work.
INA / آئینہ : The Mirror – Cities and Countryside in The Midlands
We were delighted in 2021 to be able to (finally) properly open our doors to photographers. And where better to start than the region we call home? The East Midlands is one of the UK’s most unique areas. Everything from Robin Hood, Allan Sillitoe, Sleaford Mods and the site of the UK’s largest meteorite landing in Leicestershire.
But it’s not all quirks. The East Midlands has seen some of the most stagnant economic growth in the country in the last 10 years, highlighted by the lowest GDP growth of any county in the UK. Factors like unemployment, under-funding and abuse by political leaders have meant people through the county have had to work much harder than they should, with fewer opportunities than they deserve. This is especially apparent in rural areas.
INA / آئینہ is a photography exhibition by Hussain Abbasi and Danyal Afridi to explore this disparity. They wanted to take the heritage of their Pakistani parents in the cities of the area, as well as their own deep connections to the rural areas in order to show us the stark beauty between the two in a contemporary setting. INA / آئینہ is a project that re-affirms the beauty of our region, while also making us question how it’s built for a modern day population through striking city and natural photography.
The disparity between the cities and countryside areas of the East Midlands is clear, with a more established setting in the country than urban areas, but also one that still lacks the development promised to the region on so many occasions. The result is more often than not the stark natural beauty, with the ever-present industrialism that originally brought people flocking to the region after the 1800 s, thanks to the careful and deliberate skills of Hussain and Danyal.
Got an Idea?
Then share it with us!
We’re always up for receiving pitches for projects, ideas or concepts that you think we could offer tangible help with.
While it might not always be something we can contribute resources to at the moment, we will always take everything pitch seriously, provide feedback (solely in our opinions as a collective) and will clearly explain how we think we can help if we can.
If we feel we can’t help, then we’ll also always try and direct you to places that may be able to support you with resources, funding or just offering the right opportunity for you as an artist.
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