Eregata
VICTORIA KINGHAM at Hastings Contemporary’s new Spring show
The spring and summer seasons at Hastings Contemporary promise to be the best yet both in terms of exhibitions and participatory activities. The gallery are thrilled that they have now been able to extend their half-price ticket offer to residents of the whole of the Rother area, with the aim of welcoming even more visitors. This spring they have ‘Eregata’, an exhibition of the work of the Ethiopian artist Elias Sime, and a special exhibition of works for sale, ‘A Hundred Portraits’ by long-time Hastings resident Quentin Blake.
Like much African art, the work of Elias Sime is, while internationally recognised, extremely patriotic. The colours of the Ethiopian flag are red, green, and yellow; Sime’s work is intentionally predominantly red and green. It is perhaps significant to any artistic output from Ethiopia that some evidence suggests that all humans originate from a place close to Addis Ababa (Sime’s home town) making all of us ultimately products of an ancient African diaspora.
Elias Sime at Zoma Museum 2023
AN APPROACH TO CALM
Sime aims through his work to approach Eregata, a word that in ancient Amharic translates to ‘serene’. It is extraordinary then that to create this he has used a mass of electronic detritus – old keyboards, motherboards, electric wiring, casings – the ultimately disposable hardware enabling the worldwide clacking that we have now come to accept as the exchange of information. And his lovely, massive, tirelessly-worked creations do somehow approach serenity.
Part of the effect is achieved through the jigsaw-like regularity, perhaps predictability, of most of the designs. Sime adopts a collaborative approach and works with a team of studio assistants. Why not, when the components themselves, possibly made in China, have passed through hundreds of hands and probably dozens of countries to get to where they are? Each assistant can, for example, work with similar components on a complex rectangle of identical size, but each rectangle is therefore unique. The colours and the textures suggest topography (some of the works are made up of bits of old maps), the colours of the living earth, the friction of progress against, you could say, eternity.
In this work, then, artefacts beginning as raw materials end up as part of a calming, illustrative dialogue between the old and the new, the city and the earth, the nation and the globe. He isn’t the first or the last artist to use recycled materials to make sculpture, but the end results – the maps, the landscapes, the global environmental references in the sculptures coupled with arranged crowds of earthen ceramics, put him on a par with the best.
100 NEW PORTRAITS
Quentin Blake’s special exhibition consists of about 100 new portraits, all of which are original and all of which are for sale. At 91 he is still making art every day of his life and all of these, done in his unique, instantly-recognisable style, are new. As the patron of Hastings Contemporary he is supporting the gallery in its mission to bring world class art here for universal enjoyment.
Elias Sime – Eregata and Quentin Blake – A Hundred Portraits are on show at Hastings Contemporary from 16 March to 8 September 2024.
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