The Last Hurrah
VICTORIA KINGHAM talks to a local legend
It’s impossible to classify Linda King, or her work. Performer, homemaker, gardener, sculptor, ceramicist, drawer, painter, crafter, storyteller, creator of dreams, maker of friends – the list goes on. Now she’s selling up and sizing down, and her unique oeuvre is on display in her house in Ore, ready for everyone to admire and (if they would like) to buy.
Walking into Linda’s home, you walk into the wildest corner of someone’s subconscious. One room is filled with paintings, drawings, stitchings, models and general artefacts that represent (literally) the fabric of her life. She is her art and her art is her, and she herself makes no distinction. “It’s hard work, being me,” she laughs.
So with this ‘last hurrah’ she is, essentially, offering her creative life up for sale. There’s a silent auction of framed paintings – she’s made a ballot box (even this is gilded) into which people choose the number of the framed work and post a written bid. And there are so many other things. A whole series of wooden birds of various sizes hangs in the windows and around the room, each bird elaborately and uniquely decorated. There’s an extraordinary headdress made for a friend’s wedding, for which “the theme was Gothic Fairytales” and King was commissioned to act as a greeter, with a little bird-tweeter in her mouth. There’s a lovely, long thin painting of a sausage dog with which I was particularly taken.
FEATHERS, PHOTOS, AND FANTASY
She makes costumes of dream and fantasy – intricate creations decorated with beads, feathers, buttons, and sequins, often fixed to found objects – she says she wouldn’t call herself a costume maker. Her skill is to acquire everyday artefacts – bits of material, tubing, neoprene, vinyl – and turn them, with complex embroidery, stitchwork, decoration of all kinds, into things exotic and fantastic. Despite this she has an eye on practicality: “The thing I’ve learned about costumes,” she continues, leading me into another room containing creations that represent herself and her history, “is that you’ve always got to be able to walk upstairs, walk downstairs, go to the loo, and eat your dinner.” This is one of the things she has learned through being a public character at countless festivals: “Even with this birdcage, you can actually get your dinner plate through the door.”
The birdcage is an old bamboo one, wildly decorated with an array of silk flowers and plastic leaves. It was part of her performance work, of which she has done many for various local organisations, including making a whole car out of cardboard for a cartoon festival, which was recycled for another event later and became a Volkswagen.
Other items in the Linda King life history room are videos and photographs: there are projects which she has made jointly with photographer Adam Piggott, for example, and old videos and postcard exchanges made before the days of email and Whatsapp (when she acted as PA for sculptor Andrew Logan) and also with Red Dragon Tattoos. The all-over tattoo on her back, which she designed herself, was done by the late Xed Le Head (see Hastings Independent for late January of this year), remarkable local and international tattooist. There’s a huge, lovely painting of Linda, by Louise Goddard (a local artist who has now moved to Wiltshire). She paid for this by redecorating Goddard’s bathroom in her own magical-realist, festival fashion.
PIRATES AND PONIES
There’s an elaborately-decorated pony too, jointly thought up by King and Judy Dewsberry (of The Beacon). The ‘pinkamino pony’ has been to various public events and festivals in different characters acting as “a vehicle for engaging with people” who, evidently, are always delighted to talk to a horse. He has also acted as King’s alter-ego, at other events. Riding him in the corner is Olympia, a life-size poodle designed with platform wedges, long arms and a hand-operated mouth. If you had the skill she could be a ventriloquist’s instrument but she was actually made for dancing. The room is a visual display of Hastings Carnival culture: there are pirate hats for Pirate Day, headdresses for Fat Tuesday and Jack-In-the-Green, and accessories for Beatles Day. Various characters have been recycled and turned into something different over the years, depending on requirements.
Where is King going next? She has no idea, but is looking on this goodbye sale as an opportunity to start a new chapter in a most unusual life. She is one of a minority of artists who are themselves never absent from the things they create. “I have a lot, I give a lot, I do a lot, I am a lot,” proudly announces a ceramic plate she made. She belongs here in the lovely carnival culture of Hastings and should be treasured and nurtured.
At the very least, go along to her house on Old London Road, instantly recognisable for its colourful exterior and rewilded front garden, and have a look: the joyous, over-the-top, eccentric, extrovert, decorative style of all of King’s projects will succeed in making you very happy.
The Last Hurrah, Linda King’s herstory and archive, is available from 538 Old London Road, TN35 5BN from 14-20 June open 2pm till 7pm daily. Don’t miss it – it’ll never happen again
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What a fascinating exhibition and person. Sounds to me like The Hastings Contemporary should seize the opportunity to have this extraordinary collection of local creator Linda Kings work in their collection. Before it is disbanded for ever! Or put a show on in the ground floor gallery?!!!