About

About Cement Fields

Cement Fields is a visual arts organisation working across North Kent.

Collaborating with artists and communities, we use arts practice to ask radical questions and explore new ideas, embracing North Kent as a unique site of enquiry and exchange. We consider global realities through local contexts, and conceive new, equitable, and sustainable futures.

An exploration of place and process, our programme is defined by the multiple shifting landscapes that stretch along the Thames from Dartford to Whitstable. It’s a place where boundaries blur, where busy urban centres sit alongside industrial sites, where waters slow in marshes and wetlands, and the major arteries of rivers and roads connect rural areas and seaside towns.

Home to some of the UK’s most historically underserved communities, North Kent faces multiple, intersecting challenges from employment, education, health, food, inequalities to lack of access to nature. Yet it maintains a strong identity and history of grass-roots activism, with people finding their own ways to cultivate resistance, care, and learning.

We are committed to nurturing generous, non-extractive relationships with all the people we work with, prioritising hospitality, trust, and mutual care, while fostering an ambitious and experimental spirit throughout our work.

Cement Fields has grown out of Whitstable Biennale, and since 2018 we have transitioned away from the Biennale model towards long-term programming that prioritises embedded, collaborative, and sustainable models of working, while maintaining our longstanding commitment to slow, thoughtful, artist-centred thinking.

We see the organisation itself as a site of enquiry; a place to test new ways of working, foregrounding open-ended research, critical enquiry, and experimentation. We aim to be transparent and honest about our successes, failures, and limitations in shifting our approach beyond the traditional extractive and unsustainable structures that surround us.

Cement Fields is proud to be a National Portfolio Organisation, supported using public funding by Arts Council England.

Our values

Generosity – providing a warm welcome to all, ensuring all aspects of our work are inclusive and accessible.

Experimentation – committed to supporting experimental, ambitious dialogue and exploration; encouraging artists, participants and audiences to explore new ideas and take risks.

Honesty – we make space to acknowledge and explore our entanglement within the unsustainable systems and structures which continue to perpetuate societal inequality.

Complexity – embracing challenge and difference; committed to conveying the complexity of our lived experiences in accessible ways without losing nuance.

Generative – committed to moving away from traditional extractive models, towards longer term ways of working which embody care and respect and develop over time.

Exchange – enabling collaboration between colleagues, artists, communities and partners; committed to sharing our learnings, the successes and failures beyond our context.