Small, but Perfectly Formed
VICTORIA KINGHAM
Graced as we are with so many small exhibition spaces in addition to the established Hastings Contemporary and De La Warr Pavilion, it’s easy to miss some of the smaller, necessarily more fleeting, but high-quality art shows. This is a brief look at three recent ones.
AMICI GALLERY, DECLARATIVE LANGUAGE
This is an intriguing exhibition full of paintings that are different artistic responses to the act of caring, usually for a neurodivergent child. They are therefore thoroughly diverse but have a commonality which you could probably say was the trope of a broken thread, a feeling of interrupted flow, of immediate response to unexpected situations. The large works of Alexis Soul-Gray are especially evocative, figures turned on their heads and immobilised toy soldiers looking pensively out at the viewer.
But there are smaller gems in this show such as the work of Mindy Lee, which she describes as autobiographical, ‘exploring intimate family moments around motherhood, family, death, and a shifting sense of self.’ This last sensation will be familiar to every parent: the infinite trail of small interruptions that makes up the fabric of early parenthood. Lee’s work is painted on silk, its surface hypersensitive to light and change. Three embroidery hoops of different sizes stretch the material tight, but the painting on each goes beyond the boundaries to the ragged edges, faintly suggestive of some ill-defined but continuous narrative. Monochrome, in the colour of clay – primal yet expressive.
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HASTINGS MUSEUM AND ART GALLERY, RUTH CALLAND
This solo show’s full title is This is All the Treasure We Can Have or Hold, a quotation from a 1931 poem by Jan Struther that celebrates the wild flowers beneath our feet. Calland’s exhibition goes a stage further – they use the analogy of a flower’s possession of dual sex organs to explore transgender and non-binary identities and view their own work as ‘transecological imaginary’. Worried by what they see as rigid representations of both gender and environment, Calland has turned to Tik-Tok to find images of people who consider themselves either trans or non-binary, mostly in the open air. The images are uninhibited, the colours (you might call them Fauvist) the same. Remarkable about these images of people – dancing in the park, skipping in the open air, simply hanging out by a tree – is the joy, the light, and the movement with which Calland has imbued them.
MARKUS THONETT AT BARNABY’S
Residents who are interested in local art will be familiar with the excellent card cuts that Markus Thonett makes of some of the iconic locations in Hastings and St Leonards. Every Monday Markus hosts an hour’s discussion, ‘Skyhooks’ at Barnaby’s Lounge in Robertson Street. This is ‘a platform for communicating about creativity, to create something, to come up with something that didn’t exist before.’ It’s an hour for a free discussion, on a Monday evening, for anyone interested in the creative arts. And he stresses positively no AI. His latest show – Pub Crawl – will also be on exhibition at Barnaby’s Lounge from 9 May.
Amici Gallery: amici.art/events; Mindy Lee: mindylee.me; Alexis Soul-Gray: alexissoulgray.com; Ruth Calland: hmag.org.uk/see-and-do/exhibitions/this-is-all-the-treasure-we-can-have-or-hold-by-ruth-calland/: Markus Thonett: facebook.com/markus.thonett
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