Alex Culshaw's newly commissioned work Blue Lagoon is premiering at Middlesborough Art Week 2026 until Saturday 3 October!

About the work

Blue Lagoon explores the links between industrial extraction, ecological care, and somatic release through the lens of a post-industrial North East England coastline. The film features a stretch of coast near Seaton Carew, locally known as the 'Blue Lagoon', which shares its name with an infamous 1970s nightclub located just down the road. This twinning of coastal landscape and nightclub space fuses these distinct environments, leaning into overlapping layers of site, memory, and imagined geography. In connecting these references, the film reflects on how nightlife culture so frequently inherits industrial geography, turning spaces built for heavy extraction and manufacturing into sites for music and movement. In doing so, the work examines the friction between the necessities of labour, leisure, and latent threat, exploring how industrial terrain is reconfigured into a sanctuary for restorative and collective joy.

Adjacent to these coastal sites, three distinct generations of energy production — a nuclear power station, an offshore wind turbine assembly port, and a decommissioned oil rig undergoing dismantling — exist in immediate proximity to a wildlife conservation area, a golf course, and the quiet routines of local dog walkers and birdwatchers. Moving beyond a localised landscape study, Blue Lagoon considers the paradoxical co-existence of heavy industry and protected coastal ecologies, constructing a synthetic, composite interior that contrasts the physical shore with an imagined nightclub.

The production methodology mirrors these spatial tensions, weaving location field observations, personal mobile phone archives from club nights, and staged studio environments. Guided by a score that transforms coastal field recordings into a driving electronic track, the film moves beyond simple binaries of industry versus environment. In raising questions around how we navigate regimes of extraction alongside the desire to protect coastal ecologies, Blue Lagoon positions the dance floor as a vital sanctuary: an essential mechanism for counterbalancing labour, processing loss, negotiating environmental friction, and sustaining collective presence in times of crisis.

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Co-commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella and supported by an Arts Council England Developing Your Creative Practice grant.

Supported by FVU:LAB a research and development residency for artists supporting access to new technology in moving image.

FVU:LAB is a Film and Video Umbrella initiative delivered in collaboration with Nottingham Trent University.

FVU:LAB is supported by The Fenton Arts Trust. FVU is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.