MASS Observations
DAVID MILTON
One of the many kiss-of-death committees which blight the lives of all small towns decided at the planning stage that De La Warr Pavilion could do without a signature sculpture. For better or worse they spared us Frank Dobson’s Persephone, leaving a conceptual and actual void. With its tagline “Meet Artists Shaping Sussex” MASS (organised by ZEROH, the 3D-art studio who like All Caps) more than fills it with a brilliant and ambitious one-day sculpture garden.
MASS Gathering supplements Tschabalala Self’s seaside-postcardy Seated to visibly transform DLWP, and refract both human presence (how other people look when they interact with big art objects) and the environment (how you see the beach or Beachy Head; how light plays on the works of art and your brain). In the absence of what the building actually merits – a Moore or a Hepworth, say – it should become a regular, much longer annual event.
Among over three dozen works, Christian Funnell’s Single Use has the best spot, by the domed shelter. From afar it’s like a giant abandoned crown; up close its wire tendrils form a junkyard nest. From inside you can people-watch or look out longingly towards the distant cliffs. Monuments from Liz Wilson’s Of Confluence multi-media installation stand like heavyweight sandcastles, pebbledash navigation buoys that have somehow been beached on the sun-bleached lawns. The steel strands of Almuth Tebbenhoff’s The Hedge wave from the terrace towards a DJ who with nods and grimaces aplenty attempts to deliver a redundant party vibe.
INSIDE
Inside DLWP’s auditorium an Airbnb aesthetic abounds. The MASS Exposure art fair offers works in wood, paper, metal, clay, fabric, even Rachel Ring’s plastinated teabags. There are competent stabs at Hans Arp-like objets d’art for the second home owner’s mantelpiece; some Goth burnt offerings which one imagines Nick Cave might hang in his bathroom; plenty of clunky Perryesque pots of the kind that mistakes brash for bold. But there’s nothing on a par with the conceptually robust and technically exquisite work of Katie Boccaccini-Meadows, the best of Bexhill’s Common Clay potters; or with the wow factor of Cătălin Filip’s ceramic curtain, Petrichior, at Fresh Salad Art’s Pylos exhibition at Electro Studios last autumn.
Best in show: Isobel Smith whose Sunday Papers performance sees the artist transform herself into a work of art, a newsprint-bound gargoyle left sitting forlornly at a table of mute soft toys. Compelling, authoritative and hilarious, she should be featured in DLWP’s main gallery.
Providing the punters with a sophisticated but discomforting take on muzak is the day-long, collectively realised Passing Through, organised by James Wilkie, director of the pioneering SONO festival. The performers are hidden behind a gauze curtain through which can be glimpsed an ominous pendulum. Its dense pulsating cloudlike clusters of sound and contemplative ambulatory tonalities would work much better among the sculptures in the open air, to drift as we do weightlessly between and through solid forms.
MASS was at De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, on 16 August 2026 as part of Bexhill Art Weekender. Visit zerohstudio.com.
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