Maraid Mcewan

Maraid Mcewan is an artist, designer, researcher, and creative educator whose work explores the emotional and social dimensions of collective experience. Through drawing, sculpture, ceramics, photography, and installation, she investigates the dualities between landscapes and memory, the personal and the political, permanence and ephemerality.

Her current sculptural practice focuses on creating forms that respond directly to the environments they’re made in, using local, natural, or reclaimed materials such as clay, ash, and plant-based pigments. These vessels become imprints of place, holding stories, histories, and emotional residues embedded in the land.

The 2025 theme of Vessels resonates strongly with Maraid’s artistic approach. In this project, she will work with young people to explore how both the physical landscape of the Estuary and the metaphor of a vessel can hold memory, transformation, and possibility. Through co-created sculpture and material experimentation, participants will be encouraged to see themselves as vessels of knowledge and potential, shaped by place, but also shaping its future.

Maraid describes her socially engaged practice as a shared social arts practice, placing collaboration and care at its core. She has extensive experience working with young people, SEN groups, and underrepresented communities, creating accessible and imaginative spaces for expression and belonging. Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Young V&A, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, La Yareta Gallery, Gallery L’Ecosse D’Oc, and Hackney Downs Studios. She has undertaken residencies in Chile, Scotland, and Spain, where she continues to develop her participatory and landscape-based practice.

For Estuary 2025, Maraid was selected to devise and deliver the project HOP ABOARD! 

HOP ABOARD! is Estuary 2025’s engagement programme including workshops and resource packs for local schools and live briefs with FE colleges culminating in two professionally curated exhibitions. The project has been supported by Southeastern and is part of the Railway 200 programme celebrating the  200th anniversary of the birth of the modern railway.

The HOP ABOARD! programme invites audiences and participants to explore how movement, memory, and time shape our understanding of place. It investigates the shifting landscapes of the Estuary, the trades and industries that have defined it, and their own role in imagining its future. It explores landscapes past, present, and future through shifting perspectives. Train windows reveal layered moments in time: fields giving way to factories, waterlines shifting with the tide, industrial sites reclaimed by nature. Work will explore the Estuary’s past (its industries, railway history, or landscapes before development); The present (what they see today); and An imagined future (a utopian, dystopian, or ecologically transformed Estuary).

The programme aims to empower participants and festival visitors to see change not as loss, but as a vessel for action; for communities, for the environment, and for the landscapes still to come.

Photo of the artist by