Freelands Foundation

A 2026 short film documenting a collaborative project designed to support the wellbeing of teachers, whilst providing them with care and time to foster inspiration, collaboration and peer learning.

This short documentary film documents the uniquely collaborative project Creative Break Time. Created by Focal Point Gallery, Metal Southend and The Other MA (TOMA) the project takes place between 2024 to 2027 as they work closely with local school teachers and creative practitioners through a collaborative, active research project. Creative Break Time explores the wellbeing of teachers whilst providing them with care and creative time to foster inspiration, collaboration and peer learning. The local project seeks to connect 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. As of 2026, the collaboration has: hung out in intensive residencies across Essex, travelled by boat to cross the Blackwater Estuary, shared our work at the iJADE 2025 Conference, hosted crits for artists and teachers, commissioned teachers to create wellbeing gifts and tools for their colleagues and co-developed new teacher training tools to ‘itch the curriculum’. The project's co-researchers include teachers from Greenways Primary, Milton Hall Primary, Shoeburyness High and St Bernard’s High School, as well as artists from all disciplines who live and work in South Essex. Through interviews and moments captured from projects, the short film spotlights the project’s ultimate mission to bring Southend artists and teachers together in transformative ways – weaving in its joyful yet grounding ethics of care, rest, wellbeing and meaningful collaboration. 

Artist, researcher and educator Laura Yuile traces her exploration of surfaces, systems and ghosts to inform her methodology of site-specific and culturally responsive pedagogies when teaching across contexts in the UK and China.

In this SHIFT film, Laura Yuile reflects on how her artistic practice and research shapes her approach to teaching across contexts in the UK and China; observing and directly responding to the material conditions of her surroundings while imbedding the importance of fieldwork to enable critical engagement as part of her teaching practice.Having spent the past three years working within a transnational university partnership in China, and now preparing to return to the UK, the film traces Laura's movement between and response to specific educational, cultural and spatial conditions. Working on projects including Heavy View, ASSET ARREST, Museum of Modern Shopping, and her ongoing research titled “Yiwucore,” Laura explores how surfaces, systems and speculative futures in the form of 'ghosts' structure everyday environments, from luxury property developments to global commodity networks.At the Institute for Creativity and Innovation, a partnership between the University for the Creative Arts and Xiamen University, she has attempted to translate these concerns into a site-responsive pedagogy. Through workshops, field trips and collaborative activities with students, they are encouraged to engage directly with their surroundings - entering real estate developments, exploring shopping environments, and responding to unfinished urban zones - treating them as sites of research and production. This has included establishing a space in the local village for exhibitions and events, which is now collectively run by ICI staff and associates, and is a place that can forge encounters between the communities that inhabit both the campus and the village.Moving fluidly between practice, research and pedagogy, the film considers teaching as a form of artistic inquiry: a way of navigating complex infrastructures through observation, participation and experimentation, and of finding ways to work within - and through - the shifting conditions of contemporary life. As she prepares to return to the UK, these methods remain in motion, shaped by context, and open to being reconfigured in relation to new environments.