UNCANNY WATERS:
APT Gallery, Deptford
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Uncanny Waters 2025
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Uncanny Waters film 2025-2026
WINNER Best LGBTQ+ Filmmaker 2025, Big Syn International, UN Sustainability Development Goals
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The new work from Uncanny Waters 2026
Uncanny Assemblies
Wormholes
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More about the artists
In 2024-2025, Heads Bodies Legs presented ‘Uncanny Waters’, a 6 month series of creative costume workshops, led by costume designer Lu Firth and artist Ray Malone. From this costume and performance project a community emerged; a new collective of intergenerational, LGBTQ+ artists whose shared practice now continues through a larger-scale exhibition opening at ATP in Deptford in November 2026.
Pictured above is clip from the short film about the project was shown on the screens at Piccadilly Circus, as winner of Best LGBTQ+ Director Big Syn, Sustainable Development Goals 2025.
“This whole event has become my number 1, of my top 10 experiences in my life”
Teabag - Uncanny Waters community member, May 2025
Clouds amass over the Thames,
a lighthouse keeper watches over the
remains of a shipwrecked
queer bar in Deptford
Marooned amongst debris in the creek, costumed characters, crawl, dance and fly
Upturned boats become devotional spaces, flooded domestic scenes and undersea caverns merge through reflective surfaces.
Mudlarked relics, salvaged materials and hand-made textile works hold fragments of histories telling of queer survival along this tidal tributary.
Uncanny Waters at APT Gallery will be an immersive, collective exhibition and public programme exploring queer myth-making and unpredictable futures. The exhibition transforms APT Gallery into a dreamscape of domestic ruins, uncanny portals and altars to queer becomings. Broken glass sculptures suspended overhead provide shifting reflections like moving water, while soil pathways track audience movement & participation.
The exhibition will foreground process by inviting audiences into a collective act of re-making. Workshops, live activation, spoken word and evolving sculptural interventions will continue during the exhibition period, allowing the space to constantly change and accumulate traces of those who enter it, and so everyone can witness the labour and transformation embedded within the work..
“The stories behind the project and process allowed me to understand and enjoy the exhibition with more depth. I also really enjoyed the artists' conversations with each other and their voices that highlighted the enjoyment they got from the intergenerational aspects of the work.”
Jhinuk Sarkar, May 2025
Wormholes
‘Wormholes’ is a series of interconnected artists’ films that weave together through unexpected connections. Each film can be experienced as a standalone work, and yet they are all linked through recurring characters, images, and narratives that echo across the work. The fractured glass of a lighthouse lens reappears in another story; the coming-of-age journey of a teenage worm, echoed in the menopausal transition of an ageing ale wife.
Throughout the films, recurring signs and symbols act as visual threads, drawing audiences through the work. Motifs that have emerged across the collective’s practice, including lighthouses, water, found objects and debris washed ashore, appear as portals between stories. Surreal visions emerge from personal landscapes, local histories and everyday encounters, blurring the boundaries between myth, memory and lived experience.
Embedded throughout the exhibition, QR codes function as "wormholes" that transport audiences beyond the gallery walls. Hidden within artworks, printed materials, and the exhibition space itself, they provide access to films, songs, oral histories, and fragments of archival material. These digital portals extend the project into a wider constellation of stories, inviting audiences to navigate their own pathways through the work and uncover connections between the exhibition, the local area.
“The performances were stunning! and the panelists provided such a needed voice and link to community work.”
Gabriela Salas, May 25
Uncanny Assemblies
The Uncanny Assemblies are a series of public gatherings, workshops and discussion events running alongside the exhibition. The programme creates spaces for artists, scientists, activists and local communities to collectively explore environmental and social responsibility through creative practice, discussion and shared making. Participants will engage with river justice, experimental access practices, shared material cultures and queer storytelling through collective conversation and participation.
Contributors include exhibiting artists, queer ecologists, mudlarkers, access workers, disabled creatives and activists including LGBTQ refugee Dr Namair Masud from Glitter Cymru, poet and founder of Des Cript Joseph Rizzo Naudi and writer Juliet Jacques.
The Uncanny Assemblies emerged from conversations with artists and audiences around concerns relating to water pollution, trans safety, migration and disability justice. These conversations reshaped the curatorial direction, supporting broader cultural perspectives and expanding the aesthetics of the exhibition.
Uncanny Assemblies:
Reclaiming Waters responding to local ecological knowledge of the Thames, combining scientific input, mudlarking materials & pollution research. Workshops and talks with scientists, activists, mudlarkers & residents directly shaping how ecological harm is understood & represented.
Future Queers this Assembly will be led by the Trans and non-binary members of the collective. It emerges from lived experiences of trans & disabled artists & interconnected communities & respond to current political conditions affecting bodily autonomy & access to safety, particularly in relation to toilets. The strand is shaped through dialogue with participants & access specialists.
Shared Material Ecologies is structured around participant-led making practices & queer ecologies. Intergenerational workshops such as textile repair, storytelling & shared making sessions arise from participant interest in mutual support & reflecting our process of collaboration & exchange through conditions of precarity.
Left: Anthony Psaila’s Queer Tamas workshop at London Museum, February, 2026.
Middle: Dr Namair Masud in Cardiff
Below: bug! with a tiny toilet in Somerset House, 2025.
Numair (he/him) an LGBTQ+ refugee and scientist, he successfully claimed asylum in the UK, Numair is passionate about representing and amplifying the voices of marginalised individuals. Numair works as a researcher at Cardiff University where he investigates key issues surrounding pollutants affect on fresh water fish.
Uncanny Waters Film
Film made by Ray Malone and Steve Melia
Winner of Best LGBTQ+ filmmaker, Big Syn 2025, United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
BFI Flare 2026
“It was so poetic and surprising. The boat appearing was like a dream. Beautiful use of the outside and inside space, incredible and inspiring costumes. Mesmerising performances. Clearly the time spent together had been used profoundly. A very thoughtful and provoking exploration of queer bodies, culture, resilience and community.”
Sally Ruth Davies, May 2025
UNCANNY COLLECTIVE
Meet the artists and learn more about their plans for the exhibition.
“this definitely could be taken to a bigger audience.”
Mandy Smith, May 2025
Arkem Mark Walton
Arkem (he/they) is a performer, maker and creative enabler. They enjoy a maximalist approach to costume and a poetically playful position with text. Arkem has graced such stages as the Young V&A, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern and a hot air balloon over Turkey. The worlds of Arkem are warm and welcoming...come on in and play!
In 2026, Arkem will bring Julián Is a Mermaid to Discover Children’s Story Centre in Stratford.
Check out more of Arkem: @arkem_mark_walton
For our exhibition at APT, Arkem will present Mergrette’s Regret, a multi-disciplinary installation combining costume, storytelling and immersive sculpture. Inspired by Thames folklore, ecological collapse, greed, campness and dampness, the work will transform a corner of the gallery into an undersea grotto built from abandoned toys, reclaimed plastics, fabric and mudlarked materials, extending upwards to three metres high. At its centre, a reclaimed throne displaying elements of the Mergrette costume, including hand-painted textiles, a cardboard fish hat and the mud-stained Ralph Lauren Polo shirt recovered from Deptford Creek. It will be surrounded by props, shells and sparkling materials that connect the installation to other artworks across the exhibition.
Left: ‘Mergrette’ by Arkem Mark Walton. Hear more about the work here.
“Loads of praise for this interwoven show”
Uncanny Audience, May 2025
Bug! (Jayson Fowler)
Bug! (they/it) blurs boundaries between human and more-than-human. It likes soil under its fingernails and lovers in its arms. bug’s practice is rooted in queerness and cripness and ecologies and care. It works and plays across myriad mediums including installation, photography, bookmaking, painting, printmaking, live art, art writing, and foraging. It does not crave humanity. It loves you. @buglikecreature
For APT bug! plans to expand the ‘jester universe’ by presenting a jester costume alongside a new series of watery fool characters inspired by folklore, ecology and queer mythology, including figures connected to moonlit tides, bog bodies and Ophelia. The installation will incorporate a public bathroom cubicle work, with textiles and sculptural elements creating an immersive environment.
Alongside this, bug! plans to create a new photographic and moving image series involving a hand-sewn and printed dress staged within water meadows.
Right: ‘The Jester of our Drowned Siblings’ by bug! Hear more about the work here.
Below: close up of bug’s costume in performance, toilet cubicle installation, part of ‘Shitting in the Woods’, winner of Goldsmiths’s Vice-Chancellors Art Prize, and an image of Ophelia, inspiration for new work.
“immersed in time travel, transported by costume, words and environments.”
Serge Rizzler Nicholson
E.M Parry
E.M Parry intends to create an installation drawing on the Melusina myth exploring watery hybrid figures that transform between the human and the mythical. The work will centre around an old tin bathtub filled with reclaimed pipe fragments, from which a silicone belly embroidered with delicate scale patterns emerges, alongside embroidered sealskin dress pieces suspended on a washing line.
They also plan to develop a live performance in which they embroider scales onto a silicone body suit.
Right: ‘Bellyful’ by E.M Parry. Hear more about the work here.
E.M Parry (they/ them) is a trans*-disciplinary artist and award-winning theatre designer, working across scenography, performance, drag, and visual art. Their work has been seen in the West End, international opera houses, pubs, clubs, ships, cabarets, museums and haunted basements. They’re an associate artist at Shakespeare’s Globe, a previous artist-in-residence at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre, and have shown work at diverse platforms and venues including the V&A, Prague Quadrennial, Fix 23 live art festival, Emergency performance festival, Riposte, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, and hARTs Lane Gallery where they had their first solo exhibition, Closet Dramas, in 2024. They live and work in Lewisham and Deptford.
E.M Parry
“I liked how the curation of the works matched the time of day and flowed easily between panel, exhibition and performance. I like how the artists held the space and made it feel immersive and interactive despite not being strictly "immersive" theatre. It was beautiful, welcoming and thought provoking.” Anonymous feedback, May 2025
Fanny Bleach (Emma Crowley-Bennett)
Emma’s installation will include her sculptural tracksuit stuffed to appear inhabited and leaking soil.
Emma will also create a ‘coming of worm’ film exploring queer identity and transformation through imagery of soil, tracksuits and hairspray, drawing on Geordie culture and happy hardcore aesthetics.
Alongside the film she plans to develop a live performance expanding on previous work presented at Creekside, using slime-inspired materials leaning into the sexy worm vibe.
Right: ‘Would you still love me if I was a worm’ by Fanny Bleach. Here more about the work here.
Fanny Bleach (she/her) is a Newcastle born theatre maker, writer and drag performer. She prides herself on creating subversive, comical and grotesque work with the aim to intrigue and disgust an audience whilst always giving them a good time. The world can be bleak, so dressing up as a prawn once in a while and covering herself in mayonnaise feels like honest work. She writes and performs for Newcastle based, all female comedy sketch group 'Your Aunt Fanny' and her grotesque burlesque alias Fanny Bleach has been crowned winner of drag competition Top Of The Slops season 3. Her first solo show 'The Nearly Naked Show' is in development and set to hit Edinburgh Fringe 2026.
“You could see all the hard work and care involved in the project, I really valued that.”
Jhinuk Sarkar, May 2025
George Cox
George Cox (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist and creative educator currently located within absurdity. The openness of their personal practice manifests through sculpture, screen based media, and the activation of spaces through installations. Through the layering and combining of processes, they examine the act of examining and the barriers of spectatorship.
George will present a series of glass gloves displayed in different states of repair, charting their evolution across previous performances, from whole (Creekside), to deteriorating (Vogue performance), to disrepair (APT). These fragments would be suspended from the ceiling and mounted on walls surfaces, with lighting that casts them as rain-like forms. Alongside this, George plans to show screen-printed silk organza gloves extended with rings of material to create in/ unhuman like proportions, suspended as draped.
George will be the lighthouse keeper of the collective.
Right: ‘Mending/ Mended’ by George Cox, modelled by Vogue dancer and artist Franciso Zhan. Hear more about the work here.
Below: Fresnel glass in a lighthouse
“It was a magical show and totally unexpected. “
Jacquie Ujetz, May 2025
Honor Bathurst
Honor will create a series of wearable sculptural objects designed for two or more people to wear at once, exploring how joined-up clothing can shape experiences of holding, guiding, listening and moving through space together. They plan to make at least five different pieces in sheet metal, treating them as functional tools that also reference protective armour and ornamental adornment. These works will be intended for visitors to try on within the exhibition, allowing them to physically experience collective navigation and interdependence.
Right: ‘Toolbox’, by Honor Bathurst. Learn more about the work here.
Below is an example of similar work:
Honor is a cross-disciplinary artist and a seamster, with a practice rooted in drawing. Their work has been worn by musicians, been eaten, been flown off a mountaintop. They are drawn to shifting states, to icecream, metals, to phenomena that unsettles and makes sticky the static. They enjoy how materials can feign one another, how sunlight in the sea can look like the hard sugar shards of a boiled sweet. They are often thinking about seams, folds in the sky, darts in relationships, gathers in the mind, buttonholes in the street. How everything is as intentionally crafted as a pair of trousers. Much of their work is on paper, and much is starting to unravel away from paper.
@honor_cecil
“It would be good to develop the creekside performance a bit further. More costumes, more ritual, more singing. “
Billie, Uncanny Audience, May 2025
K.A Harper
K.A Harper will create three slightly larger-than-palm drawstring bags from screen-printed fabric, embroidered with red thread, pearls and leather string, they will be dipped into the Mersey as part of their material transformation. Each bag will hold a different set of contents, such as Nichirin Buddhist prayer beads, earth, or secrets, representing K.A Harper, her mum and her nan, forming a personal lineage of memory and connection. These objects may be used in performance or installed within the evolving scenography of the space, potentially arranged as an altar drawing on the butsudan/gohonzon in my home and resonating with ideas of collective shrine-making.
Right: Costume modelled by artist: K.A Harper. Hear more about the work here.
Below left: Video from K.A Harper family creating the matriarchal lineage hand print that was screen printed onto the skirt, creating the basis of the costume. The video maybe used as K.A Harper’s ‘wormhole.
Below right: Detail of fabric, with threads and faux pearls, development of work into ceremonial bags.
K. A Harper (she/they) is a trans-disciplinary artist, performer and access worker. Creating work spanning music, photography, drag writing and performance, their practice looks at marginalised histories from an autoethnographic, embordied queer lens. Harper is a queer historian whose work has been showcased at international conferences in the U.S, U.K and Amsterdam. They're currently a resident artist at Triangle LGBTQ+ Cultural Centre in Deptford where they sing regularly.
“Was very impressed by the singer”
Svar Simpson, May 2025
Kate Coss
Kate will create a post-shipwreck installation imagining a queer fantasy island tavern and cabaret space, built from flotsam and jetsam assemblages alongside her costume rig, where travellers, human and more than human, arrive with the tides. Drawing on the story of Jeanne Barret, alongside influences such as SpongeBob SquarePants and the camp, uncanny 1970s series Fantasy Island, the work reimagines survival, fantasy and queer navigation through hostile environments. During ‘opening hours’ Kate will inhabit the role of tavern keeper, hosting the space as a site of gathering, storytelling and refuge for those who wash ashore.
Right: ‘Botany and Banners’ by Kate Coss. Hear more about the work here.
Kate Coss (she/her) is an embodied culturally nomadic queer creative scavenger. Since 1971. From a family of serial migrants, both cultural and physical, she is fascinated by the idea of belonging and the queasy possessive exclusion it often seems to engender. Shaped by queer culture & the rave/free party/environmental activist scene of the late 80’s/90’s, the intersectionality of these movements helped her explore her political nature. The ethos of community celebration and protest underpins all her work today. She is an environmentalist, sculptor, photographer and writer.
“Thank you to the hosts and the people who've facilitated the workshops behind this event!! thank you to the artists!!”
Nick, Uncanny Audience, 2025
Lu Firth
Lu Firth (she/they) was the Lead Costume Designer and workshop facilitator for Uncanny Waters in 2024-2025 and has been collaborating with Heads Bodies Legs since 2016. Lu is a costume designer specialising in historical dress, gender, and identity, with research exploring the clothing of Highwaywomen, South London tailors, the decline of haberdashery, and the ways gender is constructed through dress, particularly in relation to trans men and women. They have worked with organisations including StoneCrabs Theatre Company, CoolTan Arts, and Seachange Arts, and have taught textiles and dressmaking for over 20 years. Alongside their creative practice, Lu has supported homeless communities for more than 35 years, with a particular focus on LGBTQ+ people experiencing homelessness.
Lu will work with nets as a primary material, overlaying and combining them to create new plaid and linear patterns that are printed, stitched and used to construct both wall-based works and costume elements. She plans to develop a participatory installation where visitors and collaborators can learn and contribute basic knotting, knitting and crochet techniques, building large-scale suspended textile forms that evolve throughout the exhibition space. This environment will be activated through live making and performance, culminating in a projected seascape of debris and seaweed that is continually shaped by collective acts of sweeping, knotting and singing.
Right: Photo of Lu Firth at the Creekside showcase, May 2025
Below: References - example materials
“…Its many layers of artist and cultural creativity and engagement, diversity of artistic practices and queer community spirit..
A brilliant project, really well thought out, interesting and entertaining.”
Shanti Freed, May 2025
Medusa Has Been (Anthony Psaila)
Medusa Has Been (he/him) is a drag persona created at age 60 to help transform the artist’s third act. Previously, a teenage runaway, an itinerant twink, a bereaved lover, a professional communicator, a mature student, a senior lecturer, it was inevitable ageing that became a pressing challenge, along with the fear of becoming invisible and irrelevant. Medusa Has Been has consequently become a provocation, a conversation, a reminder, a disgrace, a delight.
For APT exhibition Anthony will create an immersive family shrine centred around the Medusa/Britannia costume, displayed as a sacred figure within a tent-like installation suspended from the ceiling. The space will combine personal and uncanny domestic objects connected to migration, queer heritage and family memory, including old photographs, suitcases, rosary beads, embroidered slippers, terracotta vessels, mudlarked materials, shells and seaweed. Audiences will be invited to enter the rust-dyed scared space, where symbolic offerings evoke themes of migration, mythology, labour and queer ancestry.
Top left: Medusa Has Been. Hear more about the work here.
Top right: Photos from Anthony’s Queer Tamas workshop at the Museum of London.
Below: Images from Anthony’s shrine moodboard.
“It was so well curated, thought provoking, moving and fun.”
Bianka Tonkin, May 2025
Ray Malone
Ray is developing new work exploring the political dimensions of memory through Lewisham’s fly-tipped landscapes, chamber pots and Trans Rights, folklore and found text from local Lewisham communities. Combining experimental film, photography, puppetry, performance and sound recordings the project centres on a mythical creek-dwelling figure inspired by witches, ale wives, and local histories, weaving together discarded objects, personal stories and acts of remembrance.
Ray will co create the artist short films ‘wormholes’ series with Steve Melia and the artists.
Right: Collage from Uncanny Waters - Margate postcard, a child’s eye and Deptford Creek.
Below: A chamber pot, Géricault’s The Raft of Medusa, an illustration of a 17th Century Alewife, and experiments with silicone and lace at Morley College 2026.
Ray Malone (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist working across performance, writing, visual art and social practice. As founder of Heads Bodies Legs, Ray has created large-scale participatory projects that centre queer histories and underrepresented communities, bringing together artists, researchers and audiences through making, storytelling and performance. Ray supports the other artists in the collective through facilitating partnerships, workshops and concept development, access support and curation of the exhibition.
“So much for 1 day, I feel it could have been a whole weekend spread out over more time?
…I loved that politics was there through and through time and performance content and visuals. Plus the panel brought this home and brought POC and migrant voices, that felt less present in the performance pieces. So the Panel was such an essential part. The programme booklet was a lovely thing to keep.
Stunning costume visuals. The Creek procession was hugely memorable and the collective feel of us queers on the bridge was filmic, and a bearing witness moment that will stay with me…very special. It was so good to be transported and connected with our ancestors, old, current, in the moment and future ones…”
Serge Rizzler Nicholson
EXPANDING PARTICIPATION
Des Cript
DesCript is an experimental accessibility project exploring “collaborative artwork description” and “blindness as a generative approach.” Developed by Joseph Rizzo Naudi, the project investigates how audio description, sensory interpretation and access practices can function as creative and critical artistic tools rather than solely as supplementary access services. DesCript works across visual art, performance and participatory practice to foreground disabled perspectives and collective meaning-making.
Joseph Rizzo Naudi is an artist, facilitator and accessibility practitioner whose work explores creative access, collaborative description and blindness as a generative artistic methodology. Through the project DesCript, he develops experimental approaches to audio description and sensory interpretation that move beyond compliance models toward artistic collaboration and embodied experience. His practice often centres disabled-led processes, collective storytelling and inclusive engagement within visual art and performance contexts.
Annie Hayter is a London-based writer, performer and workshop facilitator. Her practice focuses on listening, participation and creating welcoming creative spaces. She has facilitated workshops with organisations including the Barbican, Spread The Word, Entelechy Arts and the National Youth Orchestra, and her poetry and prose have been published widely across literary journals and anthologies. Hayter also works extensively with neurodivergent learners and community-based creative projects.
NEW TITLE - Blurb about this exhibition
Right top: Joseph Rizzo Naudi enjoys the performance at Creekside, May 2025.
Right middle: Annie Hayter reads the description of Honor Bathurst’s work.
Right bottom: Artists and community at the Creekside showcase, 2025.
FILM
Steve Melia is an independent filmmaker and a producer at Audible, where he makes videos to launch and tell the stories behind new podcasts and audiobooks. In partnership with Aesthetica, he creates The Listening Pitch, a documentary film grant that celebrates listening while supporting emerging talent.
“More like this please!”
Shanti Freed, May 2025
