Sounding out dreams for Medway in 2025

Meet Isabel Jaques, Arts Administrator at SparkedEcho, and Samm Anga, Assistant Producer for Electric Medway 2021.

​They will be sharing their own creative practice, artistic visions and what their aspirations are for Medway in 2025.

Isabel Jaques is a Music Composer from Sittingbourne, Kent. Her work predominantly involves composing music and sound for a variety of visual mediums. Since an early age, Isabel has always been involved in the arts, realising her passion for music and sound at an early age. She’s been fully immersed in the creative industries ever since, and thoroughly enjoys crossing multi-disciplines. 

​She started as a classically trained pianist, and dabbled with other instruments throughout her childhood. Isabel then discovered digital music creation, using an Apple Mac, MIDI keyboard and Logic Pro X. She was fascinated by the plethora of different sounds and synthesisers available, and the possibilities this would open up for her work. After this new found tech, Isabel went to Canterbury college to study Music Technology, learning new skills and techniques, including acoustics, live sound and studio recording.

​She then went on to study a music for media degree at Ravensbourne University London, an innovative, industry-focused institution, with strong encouragement for collaboration. Here, Isabel met many fellow creatives from different disciplines; film, television, fashion, motion graphics - it was the perfect opportunity to network, and to collaborate on a multitude of varied projects! This enabled Isabel to explore many different avenues, and really push the boundaries of her own work. 

Isabel has since composed custom music scores for many films, collaborating with creatives from all around the world. Her most recent score gained an Official Selection in the Soundtrack category at the Golden Short Film Festival in Italy. She truly believes that music is an integral part within film and tv; aiding storytelling, and taking audiences on a journey of emotions, giving an intimate, unique experience to each audience member alike. Recently, Isabel has been lucky enough to compose a Soundscape for Rochester Art Gallery - exploring themes of Dickens, death, Cloisterham and Edwin Drood.

Her dream for 2025, is for Medway to become a creative hub full of artists, who share their own knowledge and skill sets with one another. And, as a result, further and expand their own creative practice. Making it bigger, and better, with more opportunities to create and share works that will benefit the wider community. She would love to see events/happenings regularly in the Medway towns, with a wide choice to indulge in different types of creative activities, artworks and performances. Medway will be thriving, a ‘go-to’ town for anything creative, a bit ‘wacky’ and ‘different’. 

​Isabel is passionate that music and art can be used as a great social tool to bring joy and happiness to communities, promote mindfulness and wellness, and aid mental health issues. Her main focus would be around inspiring young people in Medway to get involved and create, young people who may not have had the chance to experience the creative industries -  due to varying factors like coming from a working class background. She feels it’s incredibly important that everyone gets a chance to experience and try different hobbies that could lead to future careers in the creative industry. This investment of time in young people would come around full circle and benefit the community as a whole, shaping and creating the future artists of Medway.

Samm Anga is a sound artist and composer living in Medway, whose work strives to create public interventions and interrogate the public. His work is fascinated with exploring the voice as a canvas for experimentation. Using creativity as a tool to dissect the psyche, he is fascinated by the multilayered identities we all embody. Indeed, his work usually concerns itself with looking more inwards than outwards. His belief is that art acts as a potent medium for uncovering unconscious ​behaviour patters, bringing self-awareness to the conscious mind. His art envisions a stronger relationship between psychology and creativity as science continually unearths the hidden secrets of the mind. Samm’s fascination with sound healing pushes him to examine how art (and sound art in particular) can alleviate stress in people’s lives, interrogating despair in intimate spaces outside of just “the exhibition.” Furthermore, his artistic vision places a great emphasis on collaboration, and expanding a network of creatives within Medway is a key aspiration. He has always focused on a multidisciplinary approach to creativity, challenging himself to higher and higher levels of competency in all his different practices.

For Medway, he envisions a glorious transformation into a centre of culture by 2025, erecting large public sound sculptures that reconstruct the landscape into a terrain of allure. Where Medway has always been seen as a geographical region with functional uses.

His vision is to transform medway into a city of creative hub by 2025, erecting large public sound sculptures that transform the relationship between community and place.

Samm’s recent work has found him composing for BBC The Social shorts (watch below), collaborating with nature and animation through a generative communal process, and conducting interviews to archive the experience of the pandemic into a time capsule.

Isabel's post has been funded by the government's KickStart Scheme, whilst Samm's post is supported by Creative Estuary's Regeneration:2031 programme.