There are a lot of names on the CAN YOU HEAR US? programme. This is about some of the names that aren’t. The designers, photographers, filmmakers, artists, makers, printers and businesses who have helped bring it all to life, and who are doing brilliant things on the Isle of Wight every day.
There is a lot that goes into making something happen. Some of it is obvious. The artists, events, activities and places people eventually turn up for. Then there is everything around it. Someone designing the thing you’re holding. Someone printing it. Someone driving across the Island with a camera. Someone sewing flags by the ocean. Someone taking an idea that has been living in your head for months and somehow making it visible.
Over the past year, CAN YOU HEAR US? has brought us into contact with a lot of people like this. The six-week celebration of culture and creativity is only part of a much bigger picture. It is about art and music, but also landscape and nature, food and heritage, community and connection. It is about more people feeling part of the culture of the place they live, people finding each other and trying things together, young people seeing possibilities for themselves here, and an Island becoming more confident about what it already has.
Those are big ambitions. In real life, they happen through people.
So we wanted to introduce you to some of them.
Thump Studio
Sam and Katie Tinson-Wood are the husband-and-wife team behind Thump Studio, an Isle of Wight design studio founded in 2021. They work in brand strategy and visual identity, describing their approach as “defining brands with heart”. They have worked with emerging businesses and global brands, and in 2025 picked up a Silver award from the World Brand Design Society for their work.
They also brought the CAN YOU HEAR US? Identity to life.
That was no small brief. How do you create an identity that can hold a nature walk, a performance, a shared meal, an installation and a workshop? How do you make something feel contemporary and ambitious without losing the warmth and character of the Island it belongs to?
Some collaborations take a while to find their feet. This one didn’t.
Thump understood CAN YOU HEAR US? incredible quickly. The big type, the colours, the playfulness and the confidence all arrived, and suddenly this sprawling thing we had been talking about had an identity. Since then, they have created the programme, posters, assets and postcards that are now making their way across the Island.
Thump are an example of the kind of ambitious design studio that can exist here and work far beyond the Solent. Sam and Katie are building a business from the Isle of Wight because this is where they have chosen to build it and we’re very glad they did.
Meeja
Then there is the place where all of those events, projects and opportunities have to somehow coexist online.
Meeja is a creative technology company based in Ventnor. Their work has often sat at the intersection of technology, culture, heritage and community. Previous Island projects include Farming Memories, which turned oral histories from retired Isle of Wight farmers into an accessible digital archive, and IW Hidden Heroes, which used exhibitions, schools work, talks and digital storytelling to encourage Islanders to explore local museum collections. They also developed the Brave Island website for young people. Not to mention, the force that are the Perry’s crafted the entire Creative Island suite.
For CAN YOU HEAR US?, Meeja built the website.
That means taking a large, complicated programme spread across six weeks, multiple locations and very different kinds of activity and creating somewhere people can actually navigate it.
It is the less visible kind of making. No flags flying overhead, no photograph with your name underneath it. But every time somebody finds an event, discovers something they didn’t know was happening or decides to take part, the digital infrastructure that was meticulously crafted by two Isle of Wight cultural champions has done its job.
Trudie Wilson and Harry Bradley
The first proper CAN YOU HEAR US? planning session with Trudie Wilson and Harry Bradley involved a cafe, a programme and a fairly practical question: right, who’s going where?
Then came the good bit. We got to hand it over.
Trudie Wilson is an interdisciplinary fine artist whose work is deeply rooted in place. She walks the Island’s coastline and landscape, works across photography, film, drawing and socially engaged practice, and draws on geology, palaeontology and ecology to understand the places around her. She even makes her own Wight Paint watercolours using Island pigments. Her CV moves between exhibitions, public art, workshops, young people’s projects, filmmaking and work connected to the Isle of Wight’s UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
Harry Bradley came to photography by a very different route. He picked up a camera in 2021 because he wanted to share his love of the outdoors, then left his construction job in 2023 to travel and pursue photography full time. After two years on the road, he came home to the Isle of Wight and now works across photography and filmmaking, particularly drawn to candid moments, adventure, people and the outdoors.
Together, they are helping capture CAN YOU HEAR US? as it unfolds.
And it has been a great collaborations. We sat around that cafe table, divided up the programme and then trusted two people with their own perspectives on this place to go and find the story.
Now photographs come back. A crowd dancing at Freshwater Bay. People gathering. Landscapes. Faces. Tiny moments you could never have put on a shot list.
Long after the activity is over, those images will remain. Not just evidence that something happened, but a record of what this Island, its people and its places felt like at this particular moment.
Liz Cooke
If you’ve spent time at festivals on the Isle of Wight, there is a decent chance you already know Liz Cooke’s work.
You may just not know you know it.
Liz makes those enormous flags that move above crowds, turning an empty field into somewhere you immediately want to walk towards. She has been making and installing them at festivals since 2008, with hundreds of her original designs now transforming sites through colour and movement.
And she makes them from an off-grid, solar-powered workshop here on the Isle of Wight.
Before flags, Liz was a photographer working and exhibiting in London in the 1990s. She travelled in India, moved to the Island and eventually began experimenting with textiles. One opportunity led to another, until something she had never planned as a career became exactly that. Today her work travels to major festivals and events, while the flags themselves are still designed and handmade here.
When Sam visited Liz in her studio recently, Liz put it rather beautifully: “The Island has made my creative career.”
It’s hard to think of a sentence that gets closer to what we hope is possible here.
For CAN YOU HEAR US?, Liz is making flags for the Ventnor Exchange Arena. When we first approached her, we had a slightly ridiculous request. Could she make us three?
Her usual minimum order at the time was considerably more.
She said yes.
They will soon be flying over the Arena, but knowing a little about the person, the place and the hands that made them changes how you see them.
