Virtual Storytelling
Over the summer of 2023, MSL led people in Hastings and Medway on a detective hunt, delving into the towns’ archives and interviewing residents to find out about the past and the lives of working people to create two digital arts and heritage projects. VICTORIA KINGHAM looks at the development of this immersive exhibition.
Margaret Sheehy is the powerhouse behind MSL, an organisation (billed as a theatre company, but actually much more than that) behind many ambitious national and international community involvement projects. Their aim, she says, is simply to tell stories. Each project is different, but many other organisations are involved, with funding, administration, staging, creation, publicity, final enactment. She is tireless in her determination to amass resources, to involve people, to create and recreate stories within history, culture, drama.
TRESSELL’S CHILDREN
In Hastings, Tressell’s Children was a ground-breaking project inspired by Robert Tressell’s well-known semi-autobiographical novel, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, which depicts working-class experience in the very early 20th century and was written while Tressell (born Robert Noonan in Dublin, Ireland) lived in Hastings. It grew out of a 1985 oral history project that had recorded stories of those who lived here between the First and Second World Wars. Over the summer of 2023, workshop participants revisited and explored these largely unknown stories of the town’s people, alongside professional artists and historians. They found new ways of telling their tales and gave old voices new life in the form of writing, graphic and digital art.
Their activities culminated in a gloriously immersive late summer exhibition and VR experience at the recently-uncovered Beyond The Door gallery in St Andrews Mews. Visitors were invited to put on a headset and were transported by the memories. The exhibition included The Song of Shadows, a film by local filmmaker Rebecca Marshall. It also drew on the innovative and wonderful adaptation of Tressell’s book as a graphic novel by Scarlett and Sophie Rickard, and included evocative sound pieces by Mary Hooper and Aram Zarikian and a moving installation by Susie Warren. Due to public demand, it was shown again in December 2023.
DIGITAL RECONSTRUCTION
Artist Adam Glen has now employed a blend of photogrammetry and 3D modelling to recreate the experience as a digital exhibition. Glen reconstructed the location from multiple scans of objects, rebuilding the walls and roof. Subsequently, he incorporated lights to replicate the exhibition’s ambience. This meticulous process has yielded a high-definition recreation of the location, now available online – details at the end of this article.
THE BIG ART OF BEACH OF DREAMS
Sheehy’s next project, due for enactment in 2025, is already under way. It will be Beach of Dreams, a huge country-wide celebration of the UK coastline. And it will start in this area with our very own stretch of coastline. “We’ll be creating big art, making mischief, gathering communities and telling stories between Dungeness and Bulverhythe,” says Sheehy. It will be an unprecedented partnership of organisations across the UK and the Republic of Ireland, bringing residents together with artists, scientists and other communities to explore, together, the ever-changing coastline through music, writing, art, theatre and other activities.
The fully-realised recreation of ‘Tressell’s Children’ can be found online at mslprojects.co.uk/tressells-children. The Rickards’ beautiful graphic novel is available at the Hastings Book Shop, by order at Waterstones, and (of course) at Amazon. More details of MSL, past and upcoming projects, can be found at mslprojects.co.uk.
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