How Sussex Speaks
September 2024 - July 2025
How Sussex Speaks was a programme of Family Day takeovers accoss the 2024 - 2025 academic year, expanding Towner's approach to intergenerational engagement with artists Ruby Campion and Yanaelle Ritter.
Ruby, a multidisciplinary artist and Yanaelle, a creative movement artist, worked in collaboration with Towner's Learning team to test prompts, materials, movement and installations that challenged families to question what they can create and ways to test what's possible in the gallery. Intergenerational audiences were invited to participate in new ways of claiming the space including dance, puppetry, storytelling and music.
Towner's foyers, corridors, our huge lift, studios, corridors and exhibition spaces transformed into making activations that encouraged intergenerational collaboration, reflections and ownership of gallery space.
Ruby and Yanaelle identified and explored themes responding to their practice, Eastbourne's ecology, real and mythical Sussex histories as well as responding to our exhibition programme: Gerard Byrne Film Inside an Image (October 2024, February and April 2025), Paule Vézelay Living Lines (May 2025) New Aquisitions: Points of View (April and May 2025) and Sussex Modernism (May 2025).
October 2024 - Let it Fall
February 2025 - Folklore
April 2025 - Soundscapes
May 2025 - Ebb & Flow
The Ravilious Collection Activity Trail
Ruby and Yanaelle collaborated once again to develop prompts, activities and challenges for children and young people engaging with The Ravilious Collection.
The new activity trail, designed for families and Key Stage 2 students was tested with sixty Year 3s at Shinewater Primary in October 2025.
"The workshop was expertly led with various interesting activities [from the resource] which highly engaged the children."
-Teacher at Shinewater Primary
About the artists
Ruby Campion is a multidisciplinary artist whose creative practice explores the use of storytelling to reshape our relationship with the world around us, particularly the natural environment. They engage with objects and artefacts, working to question conventional hierarchies of usefulness, embracing materials subject to change and decay over time, reconnecting with natural cycles and processes of change.
They are a recent graduate from the University of Brighton Fine Art course where their study focused on sculpture, process, and performance; exploring sense of place and meaning through movement with found objects and puppetry work. They have developed and supported workshops centring experimental play and found objects as well as practical techniques in ceramics and painting.
Currently, their practice is moving towards artworks offered as gifts to places, people, and communities as opposed to work intended for conventional gallery spaces.
ruby (@gluemuseum) • Instagram photos and videos
Yanaëlle Ritter is a contemporary dance artist based in Eastbourne. As a choreographer and performer, she often collaborates with musicians and creates dances for specific sites like parks, beaches, or outdoor artworks such as the Dance Diagonal mural at Towner.
Teaching dance is at the core of Yanaëlle’s practice. She facilitates creative contemporary dance classes for children, teenagers and adults across London and Sussex, for organisations including Sadler’s Wells, The Place, Trinity Laban and Eastbourne Dance Space. Yanaëlle also co-directs Company Concentric, a circle of collaborators with whom she designs and delivers performances, events and community projects.
Yanaëlle Ritter (Thiran) (@yanaelledanse) • Instagram photos and videos
