As you no doubt know, the Tapestry has come ‘home’. But you might think there is nothing new to be said about 1066. William and his Norman blokes came over and killed Harold and stole the English throne. End of story, surely.

The team at Hastings Castle, however, think that we might need to try to rethink the event that is –rightly or wrongly – forever associated with this ancient town. (Let’s not get into the mere detail that the battle was not in Hastings and The Tapestry is not a tapestry.) The fresh thinking has given rise to the first ever theatrical production in the grounds of our castle, entitled Beyond Bayeux. We were a bit sceptical about a musical show dwelling on what is, after all, England’s biggest defeat; but the production was, to be frank, utterly amazing.

STRANGE TIMES

The jagged ruins of the old castle, stuck atop a wind-blasted West Hill in the gathering darkness proved to be the most haunting of settings. As night fell the tapestry seemed to come to life in the form of eery animated projections rolling across the cobblestones. And then there was the music. Somehow Lucy Treacher’s angular, modernist music captured a sense of the times, deeply out of joint. And oddly, it melded perfectly with the authentic Old English folk music of the remarkable singer, Muco.

Perhaps the dominant insight in the whole re-think is that the narrative is all a bit of a chest-thumping cartoon-strip of macho medievalists. Apparently, there are 93 penises in the whole triumphal tea towel (although it should be admitted 88 of them belong to horses.) And there is the startling point that of the 626 characters in the tapestry, only three are women. Given these facts, it’s perhaps not such a surprise that Beyond Bayeux is, in many ways, a satire on the self-importance of power-hungry men. (Contemporary parallels with the Will and Harry saga did not go unremarked.)

WORLD UPSIDE DOWN

Inverting the past, the show was largely powered by female energy. At the heart of it all was the extraordinary Ellie Westbrook. She starred as a sharp-tongued Jester whose side comments on the pronouncements of the pompous Bishop Odo – played by the delightfully uber-male James Purefoy – punctured the whole aggrandising theatre of imperial snatch-and-grabbery. Her performance was in many ways the central dynamo, fizzing up the whole production. It should be added that she also co-wrote the piece, with Vanessa Farinha, and directed much of the music.

Having said all of that, ultimately, we were most impressed by the sheer talent of the entire ensemble, from site managers, lighting technicians, and incredible musicians, right up to the director, Cathy Brady. The historian David Musgrove gave the show some serious factual underpinning but above all, perhaps, the old, tired and windswept castle came into its own as a fantastical stage on which to give some fresh life to the mysteries of Albion’s beguiling realm.

On this evidence, the town has discovered a powerful and spiritual platform for all our stories

Something extraordinary has happened. Hastings Old Town has reached the last six of a European competition. To be more precise, Hastings Contemporary is the only UK gallery selected as a finalist in the competition to win the prestigious European Art Museum award for 2026.

The Contemporary finds itself in illustrious and daunting company. For example, one of the other five finalists is the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which is actually the National Museum of the Netherlands and has a range of works that covers 800 years of Dutch history. The idea of the Contemporary up against the Rijksmuseum in a competition has the feel of a diminutive David up against an art-gorging Goliath. And there are four more finalists, all of which are quite big hitters.

A UNIQUE ANGLE

Amongst the criteria for selection is how the museums or galleries find “innovative ways to engage with issues facing society today”. All of which sounds like the panel of judges will be looking to see if the institutions offer some sort of ‘relevance.’ The Contemporary has arguably seen that its very position perched on the sea amid a working fishing community gives it a unique angle on the world. After all, the sea is always both local and global: a fun spot and a vast atmospheric engine. Consequently, recent and forthcoming exhibitions have been soaked in sea themes.

The Director of the gallery, Kathleen Soriano, and her team, have pushed hard for this, hoping to bring artists, scientists and fishermen together to explore the sea in all its myriad complexity. The recent Meet the Fleet programme (showing until 13 September) is undoubtedly an innovative move in trying to engage with the local fishing community.

On top of this, the Contemporary tries in many ways to reach out to the people of Hastings and surrounding areas by offering family days, drawing classes for carers and those they care for and the Pearls of the Sea outreach project which works closely with local schools. Also, the Coquina café upstairs, with its delightful view, is now free to access for all. And there’s so much more that there isn’t the space to mention here.

Whether all of this will enable an act of cultural giant-killing, we shall have to wait until late September to find out.

For one precise year, a young artist, Bee Nicholls, initiated, set-up and ran the ‘Unit 2’ Art Space at the sea-end of London Road. It was her vision and her gamble. She did not and could not, of course, do it on her own: she was helped immensely by her friends and family and her indefatigable partner and fellow artist, Luke ‘Mully’ Mulligan. As the year has just ended, we caught up with her to see how she felt about her experiment in the heart of what she calls “The St Leonards Universe.”

We asked first what it felt like to set up a gallery in the current cultural and economic climate. She began by politely dismantling the question: what they had created at Unit 2 wasn’t quite a ‘gallery’ as such. “The word that doesn’t quite fit with the spirit of Unit 2.” What they were trying to do instead was create a space that was “a resource: led by artists for artists.”

She elaborated the general idea that they were simply creating an environment in which artists could grow, both in terms of creative ideas but, just as importantly, as someone validated by other like-minded refuseniks. It was, she admits, exhausting at times but the “enthusiasm from the local artistic community gave me energy”.

GRIT IN THE NORMALITY MACHINE

Bee herself studied Fine Art at the Slade School and now has a studio in the Old Ambulance Station in Bexhill. But, she was clear that “The St Leonards art scene is like no other, the sheer volume of artists working and living here is next level – there is great quality but also some grit to it.” This last comment we interpreted to be a reference to the dogged refusal to give in to normality that seems to hang in the sea air over this town.

Of course, financing such a venture would always be a headache. Extraordinarily, Unit 2 did not take commission on work sold, and the price charged for hire of the space was just what it took to meet the bills and therefore “at a workable price point”. Low costs were fundamentally made possible by the fact that it was run entirely by volunteers – indeed the whole venture was run on a not-for-profit basis. The artists often hung their own work and, if so motivated, brought their own bar! In the process, relative novices could learn to curate and talk (and drink) at the same time.

THE WHITE ROOMS OF POSSIBILITY

But running such a space also came with the sort of problems that often send artists running away screaming. As Bee put it: “The building itself was a wild ride – dealing with damp and rotten floor boards was a bit outside of my skill set.” (Suddenly, we realised that this was what might have happened to Edvard Munch.) But Bee’s artsy entourage set-to with paint brushes and hammered the space into the white rooms of possibility that defined Unit 2.

Undoubtedly, one of the great achievements of Unit 2 was the fact that over 500 artists – ranging from the occasional art superstar to hundreds of first-timers just setting out on the rocky road of art-being – were given a forum in a total of 36 shows in one frantic year. Bee added that “It’s also a credit to the local scene that so many people wanted to come here – we hosted artists and curators from London, Brighton, Scotland and even Italy, the Netherlands and Poland.” Evidently, St Leonards has some sort of gravitational pull of its own.

NO GATES, NO GIFTS

Unit 2 was by any measure a great success. It signed off with a wonderful last show, Epigeal, which was heaving with people. Unit 2 brought home the simple fact that physical space, where people can just be, is vital to the breathing spirit of art. The art experience does not have to be sifted and sold downwards by what Bee calls “gatekeepers”, with the inevitable gift shop at the end. It can spring into being from artists themselves. And in that demotic fact surely lies the essence of Bee’s wonderful achievement. We thank you.

If you have ever felt (along with John Masefield) that you simply “must go down to the sea again”, then Hastings Contemporary – set on the very watery edge of England – has the exhibition for you. The titular theme, ‘Odyssey’, is simultaneously wonderfully specific and yet all-inclusive, and hence the resulting show is kaleidoscopically diverse.

The exhibition is the result of the Gallery’s open call to all artists: there were over 2,000 entries, reduced to 152 exhibits. In a sense what the viewer beholds is a snapshot of the swirling diversity of the Sussex art scene. We went down to see what it was all about.

The Art Director of the Contemporary is the deeply charismatic Kathleen Soriano, of Sky Arts fame and so much more. She explained that the gallery’s unique position on the sea shore means that it should take its connection to the maritime environment, and indeed the neighbouring fishing community, as “part of its mission.” But this is no way a preachy exhibition. It does not deal in obvious political messaging; it speaks to us in a creative cacophony of voices. And it is all the more intriguing for that.

BEWITCHING PEARLS

However, the exhibition has been cleverly curated to bring some order out of the multiversity. To some degree each sub-gallery is given over to different types of work and there are many, from painting through photography, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics and film and mixed-media things that are beyond simple categorisation. Hermione Allsop’s Holes for example are made of ceramic, foam, grout, plaster and paint, all held together by a looping imagination. In amongst all this there is also children’s work, stemming from the Contemporary’s fantastic ‘Pearls of the Sea’ Programme for primary school students. Some of this is quite bewitching, particularly their puppets. 

Much of the work has an underlying comedic glint, often with a slightly sinister mood. Jane Andrews’ Let the Bark Bite, for example, suggests a weird sort of odyssey into the dark worlds of creepy folk tale or demented nursery rhyme. Some works are more haunting, such as Tom Banks’ eerie night/day double-image. Other works draw on traditional historic themes but are delightfully self-subverting, such as Sue Cohen’s Millie’s Friend the Radical With White Lillies, in which an acrylic suffragette seems to glow with aquatic incongruity. In a slightly similar vein is the rather wonderful The Sirens Are Bored Now by Leah Germann. Russell Baker’s Drifting North, alternatively, brings an icy silence into the visual conversations between the pictures.

HUMAN WARMTH

In the rather large category of the baffling, there is much to beguile. The purely abstract is well represented within the show but then so is the figurative. There are few traditional portraits, but we were particularly taken with the sheer human warmth radiating out of Eugene Palmer’s depiction of his late father.

In short, there is such a rich multiplicity of material in this brilliant show that it all defies easy description. Rather unfairly, we abruptly asked one particular visitor, the artist Mags Orson, what she made of the show. She said that her primary take-away was the sense of being “transported to different worlds” but that it was all suffused with “the smell and feel of the sea.” It was a spot-on observation, but every visitor will doubtless take away a different personal impression and a different sense of what constituted the highlights. And that is precisely what makes it such a great show. Do go down.

Odyssey runs until May 31 at Hastings Contemporary

There is something both alluring and rather sad about the English seaside. Somehow the seaside is full of the promise of naughtiness and fun, and yet many of the holiday seaside towns in England now feel a bit neglected and down at heel. This weird double identity is very evident in the exhibition of JJ Waller’s photography at the Hastings Museum and Art gallery, simply entitled Beside The Seaside.

A number of the photographs are clearly of Hastings and St Leonards but the exhibition also includes images Brighton, Blackpool and Benidorm. Nearly all of his work features ordinary people in all their mundane, wonderful strangeness. As the artist and occasional collaborator, Peter Quinnell observes, Waller’s work is shot through with a “genuine affection for his subjects”.

This is true, although just occasionally there is the feeling that people, frozen in an instant, simply are both beautiful and odd.

SILLY HATS AND MUGGERS

Despite the familiar theme, the work is actually very diverse. There are bodies of all shapes and sizes, with flesh sometimes scorching in the sun or people huddled against the winter wind. There are donkeys, silly hats, ice cream and of course the inevitable lurking muggers we call seagulls.

In the past, Waller has shown these images in conjunction with the distinctive work of Martin Parr, the photographer who is perhaps most associated with pulling out the surreal, almost grotesque nature of holidaying reality, when framed a certain way. Parr recently died and there is a touching tribute to him by Waller as part of the exhibition. He describes his fellow photographer as “a kind and generous friend” and a “photographic luminary.” The exhibition also includes one of Parr’s genuinely iconic seaside images.

The show also features a lot of three-dimensional pieces by other mainly local artists. There are too many to list here, but we were struck by the cartoonish work of Georgie Wheeler, the shell sculpture by Shuby and the doll piece by Tom Bartlett. But, there are many more, including one of those commemorative souvenir plates, with Liz Truss’s face on it. (Most of the work is for sale.)

HAVE FUN IF IT KILLS ME

A sense of humour seems to run through this exhibition, and it certainly seems fitting that Waller provides us with outsized sticks of rock. But it is humour that runs both ways. The photographs depict people doggedly determined to have a laugh, in a sort of ‘keep calm and carry on mucking about’ sort of way. And the viewer feels some of that hilarity in watching the English do their brave battle with wind and litter and the inevitable rain. But there is also much that is just sublime.

Perhaps we will never solve the puzzle of the English seaside. Why does it attract so many funsters, bohemians and outsiders and yet feel forgotten? Madeline Bunting, in her recent book The Seaside, has a lot to say about why so many of our coastal towns are very poor. The book, published in 2023, stated that Hastings “is still amongst the most deprived in the South East.” Almost certainly this is still the case. But something about this exhibition reveals the curious affection that so many have for this town. The old cliche about there being ‘something in the air’ positively swirls around these pictures. Bunting suggested that “Part of being English is an emotional tie to the seaside.” If you want to get a sense of our strange love-hate affair with the seaside, this exhibition has all the pathos and tacky glamour that you could ever fit on a naughty postcard. 

There is a tender and rather poignant lovers’ story behind the exhibition The Stolen Orange, off Bond Street in Brighton. The tale begins back in 1994 when a fragile, young male art student named Hal Maughan attended a poetry reading by the great Mersey Poet Brian Patten at Falmouth Art College.

A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS

Hal was too nervous to speak to Brian that night, but the poet’s book Love Poems became for Hal a cherished source of spiritual anchoring and reassurance. It was later at Falmouth College that he encountered the love of his life (and now co-curator) Sarah Shaw. Spool forward 25 years and Hal had the sweetest idea that he should give his book of poetry to Sarah as a birthday gift. But, in a moment of beautiful madness, he decided first to send the dog-eared copy of the book to Brian Patten and ask him to sign it. Incredibly, Brian not only signed and returned the book, but added a handwritten unpublished poem. Out of this came the idea that one of the book’s most uplifting poems, The Stolen Orange, could be the inspiration for an exhibition. And it was this that we went to see. In a painful twist, Brian died just before he could get to Brighton, and so the exhibition is both a celebration of love’s little acts and a memorial to Brian.

A TANGERINE DREAM

The show itself features over seventy artists, whose work revolves around the idea of an orange as if the humble citrus fruit was a magnetic sun. Obviously, there is not room to do justice to them all here, but it is worth pointing out that two of the stars of the show are based in Hastings but international in status. Geraldine Swayne brings a delightful piece, King Ludwig’s Dream, in her luscious, painterly style, But hidden away, if you care to search, is a tiny little jewel of a piece of hers, burdened with the title Celestial creature no.1. The ever-enigmatic Alan Rankle, who works between his studio in St Leonards and Copenhagen, gave us a submerged Wide World Alone, a bleached-out, intriguing version of which makes up the catalogue cover. Hal and Sarah were also exhibiting. Sarah’s painting, A bench for Brian, is haunting and freighted with a sense of the not-quite-explained, while Hal’s Bluebeard carries an impasto punch despite its quiet smallness.

Many of the artists involved had personal connections, some of which could even be tracked back to the distant Falmouth College. And in many ways the personal linkages seem utterly apposite. The human heart, with its tendency to reach out and stimulate tendrils of response, is the animating spirit of this exhibition. If you feel the need for a sunburst glow, get on your scooter and go there; failing that, reach out and find Brian’s amazing orange poem.

The exhibition continues daily until December 14 on Bond Street, Brighton, BN1 1RP.

The Stolen Orange 

BRIAN PATTEN

When I left I stole an orange

I kept it in my pocket

It felt like a warm planet

Everywhere I went smelt of oranges

Whenever I got into an awkward situation

I’d take out the orange and smell it

And immediately on even dead branches I saw

The lovely and fierce orange blossom

That smells so much of joy

When I went out I stole an orange

It was a safeguard against imagining

There was nothing bright or special in the world

The current exhibition at the marvellous Rogue Gallery on Norman Road brings us three separate, quite different artists who are nevertheless tied together by one extraordinary fact: they are mother, daughter and granddaughter. And though we do not really think artiness trickles through our bloodlines, there is something curious going on in this exhibition in that all three women seem to have inherited a Bohemianism of the soul and indeed, of the wardrobe. All three have said, ‘up yours’ to bourgeois bondage and lived their lives with the colour control turned up to eleven.

TEASING TULIPS

The original fountainhead of all this paint-splattered rebellion is Molly Parkin. Molly exploded on to the London fashion scene in the1960s, becoming a fashion editor with a mission to “tease the edges of taste”, as Dennis Hackett put it. But she was so much more: a painter, novelist, controversialist and fab hat maker. She caused a storm of self-righteous indignation in the seventies when her novel Up Tight appeared with a cover showing a French model in see-through knickers. Her paintings in the show revel in colour. Molly’s works enjoy a bit of a mess and she makes the hues dance and rebound off each other. Black Tulips, in particular, has a perfect tension between exotic pattern and splodge.

The work of her daughter, Sophie Parkin, heads off in other directions. Some of it is underpinned by mythological themes such as Persephone Returns and Hoisted by the Ancients, and yet there are whispers of other ideas and appetites at work. Oranges Are the Only Fruit has a muscular sort of force to it. Control edges out mum’s messiness. Sophie’s monoprints are very striking; we particularly liked The Ever Growing Cat Inside My Head. Like her mother, she has somehow invented multiple versions of herself: she is a novelist, poet, painter, journalist and even a social historian. Her book on Bohemian Soho did much to illuminate that lost world.

MAGICAL RETURNS

The youngest of this trio is Carson Parkin-Fairley. Her work revolves around the notion that ‘we are all icons,’ and we all have an inherent tendency to imbue people and objects with meaning that go beyond the mere mundane. She exploits the fact that image-making is also a kind of magic. As one of her intriguing titles puts it, Magical Things Happen Here. Fittingly, the granddaughter uses an image of the young Molly, in her lurid flapper look, as an obvious almost silver-screen icon. In that image there is a strange return to the well-spring. Perhaps.

It is impossible to do justice to the unique vision of each of these powerful women, and yet to grasp that somehow they are bound by some brilliant bohemian thread. In a sense, much of the aesthetic of this show seems connected to Molly Parkin’s original, fabulous advice on dressing, “just fling on any old thing, so long as it’s clashy.”

The Parkin Lot continues until 15 June 

The artist Mykki Blanco defies easy categorisation. I could shuffle and deal–poet, photographer, performer, glam-rapper, trans-gender activist and so on. But, let us leave labels to one side; Blanco is simply quite something. They have performed with all sorts of mega-stars, from Kanye West to Madonna and Michael Stipe. A few weeks ago, Mykki played a ‘secret show’ in Hastings. How on earth, you might be thinking, did this comet from some other non-binary universe pass through our seaside town?

The origin of the extraordinary gig itself is intriguing, but more of that later. The brilliant local musician Mike Willis kicked off the evening, at the His Place venue, with a set of his own Country-infused material, including Let the Answer Come to You, Cold Kentucky Water and the thought-provoking Turtle on a Gatepost. Mike brings a certain authenticity and warmth to everything he touches musically. He then took control of the turntable to support Mykki.

COME CLOSER HASTINGS

Mykki arrived on stage holding a large, bejewelled microphone, wearing what seemed to be a spangly leather waistcoat, filigree-grungy jeans and nothing on their feet. It was not, I guessed, a natural ‘Mykki’ audience: the age range was, to put it politely, wide. Mykki is used to big venues but gave it everything, working the crowd brilliantly, emanating a writhing sort of electrical charge, drawing the crowd deeper into a conspiracy of truth.

The music itself was far more cleverly put together than the quick-fire rapping might suggest, and much of it was searingly political. Words and rhythms came flying at such a speed and with such emotional energy that it was very hard to pin it all down. Certain motifs seemed to recur but were then immediately subverted. A song about the murder of George Floyd had a fleeting, bitter touch of Sweet Home Alabama; while Mr Sandman riffed off the old song in all sorts of angular ways. Some of the politics is undiluted: at one point the crowd was joining in with the chant that “patriarchy creates climate change” and at another point the “colonial systems” embedded in modern life became, somehow, a source of enchantment. Holding this sort of stuff together, and keeping it from being too preachy, is surely Mykki’s genre-blending sense of fun. Mykki has a sort of super-charged charisma, laced with glamour, anger, hilarity and melancholy that made the whole performance quite spellbinding.

GETTING IT ON

The background to the gig is worth explaining. As Mike Willis puts it, “it all came together quite organically, almost spontaneous.” The primary initiator of this event was undoubtedly the remarkable Dan Demarre Meththananda, a relatively recent arrival in St Leonards, who has brought his own powerful energies to the art world here. Dan became friends with Mykki when they met at the Airwaves Festival in Reykjavik. Both artists share a multi-modal approach to art–and life. When Dan came to this town, he conceived the idea that perhaps Mykki would agree to perform here. With the help of Mike Willis and several Hastings-based community groups and individuals–such as Katy Baird from Home Live Art, Catherine Wood from Tate Modern, Tess from Rock, Body Soul and all at Laundry Day–it was speedily pulled together: Mykki would bring his subversive practice to the Church and Community hub His Place in Robertson Street.

It was a rare gig and, as such, a big, glitzy thankyou to all involved. Mykki Blanco’s latest album is Postcards from Italia mykkiblan.co

NICK PELLING previews an up-coming exhibition at a new art space in St Leonards

Picture this: Samuel Beckett hobbling about painfully in Phoenix Park in boots that don’t fit. Why was he doing it? Because the boots had belonged to his deceased mentor James Joyce. They were sacred boots to him. Magical shoes. Boots containing some ectoplasmic essence of Joyce’s genius.

THE ST LEONARDS-REYKJAVIK AXIS

This realm of ancient totemic thinking is, to an extent, at the heart of the exhibition at the new gallery in St Leonards, known oddly as ‘Mercatoria Fishing Club.’ The exhibition borrows its title from one of Beckett’s plays: On Acts Without Words. The art-space is the creation of the extraordinary artrepreneur Daniel Demarre Meththananda. In its current mode, the gallery seeks to bring together pairs of divergent artists, deliberately both local and global, with the aim of fermenting alchemic visual conversations.

The two artists in the forthcoming show are Colin Booth, of local Electro Studio fame, and Claudia Hausfeld, a German-born photographic artist who works mainly in Reykjavik (a place, according to Daniel, very much akin to St Leonards, which is a surprising thought).

Both artists are concerned with appearance and perception and the slipperiness of the meanings we try to attach to things. Claudia’s key work is entitled Under a Glisten of Mud, a phrase taken from Seamus Heaney’s poem The Grauballe Man, about the blackened, but preserved, iron-age body found in a Danish bog in1952. Hausfeld has created a large cyanotype on hanging cotton (about nine feet tall) that could perhaps present the ancient corpse like a strange promotional banner for the defiance of decay and time. However, a closer look at the twisted blue image suggests a grimmer truth: the human body as victim of humanity: a sacrifice to long-forgotten Germanic gods, perhaps. It is, as Heaney put it, a collision of “beauty and atrocity”.

SINGING THE BLUEPRINTS

Colin Booth’s work, Singing Mechanic, has a similar sense of an object struggling to tell a life story. The art-object is essentially a dirty, but clearly lived-in, workman’s jacket. The creases and oily grime speak directly of a life of hard work. The jacket was apparently owned by Jim, a friendly man with a penchant for singing old hits such as Starry, Starry Night. Jim was eventually forced to stop working in order to become the main carer for his ill wife. But he carried on singing.

Colin also provides us with one of his trademark pieces of ambiguously comedic furniture: a rusting metal chair, so uncomfortable-looking that it is almost as if it has been made by a shipyard welder, just to mock the idea of an arty chair. The title, I Gave You the Blueprint, suggests either a bewildered customer or perhaps a claim to take credit for such a preposterous rejection of all things IKEA. The objects, it seems, can’t help but suggest stories.

The exhibition is likely to be intriguing, silly and profound in differing measures. Also, the gallery space itself is worth checking out. And, if you can only take art in small doses, the Horse and Groom pub is only a hundred yards away.

The exhibition opens on 11 April at 6pm until 10 May. The gallery is to be found at 12a Mercatoria.

There are certain subjects that baffle the human mind. For example, I do not know what a proton or a quark is. And I know this is embarrassing, but I don’t even understand Euclid’s parallel postulate. And even more embarrassing than that, I don’t really know what an algorithm is, even though they are apparently the invisible digi-creatures that rule our current world.

But one of the most mind-defying subjects is surely what they call geological time periodisation. As we all roughly know, a few hundred years ago men with beards decided that the very, very, very long ago could be neatly divided up into named segments. But, even if we take just one of those segments, say the Cretaceous period, it is bamboozling, mainly because this time segment was, apparently, seventy-seven million years in duration. I don’t know about you, but I find that my brain itself becomes a block of impermeable rock when confronted with such a notion. So, possibly we need a more sensitive way to think into that vast abyss of time gone by. Maybe artists can help.

THE JURASSIC MIND

The SoCo artists group currently have an exhibition at the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery entitled Stories From Deep Time, which seeks to use the rich fossil record of our area–much of which is part of the Museum’s display – as an inspiration for art. The result is an incredibly diverse exhibition, which doesn’t so much seek to unbaffle our minds, as just try to use imagination and creative mess to find another way into the Jurassic chambers of our sensual brains.

Doubtless all visitors to the show will have different favourites. At an amusingly almost literal level, I was very taken with Samantha Guertin’s paintings of female bathers at Pett Level, scampering about with skittish dinosaurs. As though dinosaurs had summer holidays. But there is so much else. Cheryl Bell offers an extraordinary and eccentric cabinet of curiosities, loosely themed around the work of the polymath Teilhard de Chardin.

ROCK RIFFING

Agness Clark produced two large pieces entitled Fossil Memories, which imply that our own experiences lie in our minds like fossilising regrets and passions. There is, it seems, an inexhaustible range of ways to riff from the notion of such irretrievable chasms of chrono-distance. Several artists seek to use coastline or leftover materials as some sort of conduit to the past. Fiona Denning, for example, thoughtfully explores wax and sand and unctuous paint as possible portholes. Emily Johns’ The First Flower takes a different route, smashing together an aggressive skeleton with notions of aboriginal petals and oil rigs: powerful stuff in raw black and white. There isn’t enough space here to do justice to all the artists on show; probably best to just go and see this wonderful, free exhibition for yourself.

Overall, the exhibition cannot be neatly summed up. It is perhaps as baffling as the geological riddles that so entranced seaside stumblers of the Enlightenment era. But that is, in a sense, the point–to creep up on this world of inexplicable strangeness from a myriad of angles all at the same time. Still, the heavy veil of the past will always, to some extent, leave us sketching in the dark.

The Exhibition is on at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery until April 27.

Sometimes it is important to think about things a little differently. And that is exactly what the artist Theresa Caruana is doing regarding one of art’s most ancient practices, namely ‘life drawing.’ Most people think that life drawing is that peculiar thing where a bunch of scruffy students stare at a naked person and struggle to decide on the marks that capture the flesh. But Theresa has taken the view that ‘life’ should mean something more alive. Something with real ‘life’ to it, instead of a, static, dormant nude. With that in mind, she had the brilliant idea that artists would relish the challenge of trying to draw musicians as they play. What could be more full of life than a musician playing live? We took up this challenge and found the unique interaction of really looking at the musician, whilst hearing the improvised music, quite an intense experience. Almost spiritual. (A cynic might say that the uplift in mood has something to do with the fact that these sessions happen in the back room of the Horse and Groom pub – the pencil in one hand is accompanied by a glass in the other.) We prefer to think that one drink does wonders for blowing away artistic inhibition.

A School not a School

To take a step back: Theresa Caruana is the brains behind the St Leonards Art School. If you are not familiar with this gem of an institution, it is situated on Maze Hill with a scenic view of St Leonards Gardens. The school is not really a school in the traditional meaning of the word. What is on offer is more akin to open workshops that you may attend on a pay-as-you-go basis. You do not have to sign up for a horribly expensive year or term. In fact, the prices are quite affordable. You do not need to have achieved any particular level: total beginners and enthusiastic children are welcome. What can be guaranteed is that you will be given space and encouragement (and materials and tutoring if you want them). There are classes for both adults and children at different times across the week. (The ‘Life Drawing Music’ sessions are a kind of wonderful bonus.) Theresa says that her aim is to allow students to develop skills but also to improve their own critical eye. With only five students working together most of the time, the potential for dialogue between students is clearly likely to create the kind of environment in which artists learn from each other: arguably the best way to learn. 

Sound and Vision

At the back of the pub we found ourselves drawing the brilliant and unique musician India Blue, as she played her traditional harp and, almost casually, treated us to her sonorous voice. The music really does help you get ‘in the zone’. India’s flickering fingers and delicate features were hard to capture, but the experience of hearing and listening intently at the same time is quite something. Whether your drawing is good or bad is in many ways irrelevant. What matters most is the struggle to capture something of the experience. The circular interaction of sound and vision does something profound. A pretentious person might say it re-wires the soul, or something. Not sure about that, but we will say that Theresa has found a wonderful way to put life back into drawing. 

For more details of classes and Life Drawing Music, go to stleonardsartschool.com 

The wonderful Rogue Gallery has moved. It is now to be found opposite the Kino-Teatr on Norman Road in St Leonards. The charismatic gallery owner, Ray Gange, is launching his new art-space with a knockout showing of the paintings of the highly acclaimed British painter Ray Richardson.

THE POETRY OF CORTINAS

Richardson’s paintings take us into a bygone world of blokedom. Dodgy men and distinctly dated cars are beautifully arranged into canvases that drip with the visual poetry of geezerland. His compositional skill is stunning: he divides canvases in ways that make his pictures buzz with a weird cinematic drama: the paintings are almost film-stills. You half expect Jason Statham or maybe even Bob Hoskins to be at a diagonal to a Ford Cortina. Or The Sweeney to crash the frame.

Yet his work is about more than tough types. There is an oddness to this world: not a landscape of urban anti-heroes: it is more spaced out, more like retro-gangsters go on a mystery tour.

And then there is Brian. Brian is Richardson’s English bull terrier who was very present on opening night. He features in many of the works. In many ways Brian seems the perfect creature for this south-east London world that is always tinged with menace. He seems like the living embodiment of Bill Sikes’ dog ‘Bullseye’ from Oliver Twist (Dickens would surely love this show!) But, as with so much about Ray, Brian the dog is not what he seems: we found him to be an utterly delightful chap with more interest in his master’s bag of carrots than the dark arts of doggydom.

PAINTING IN ENGLISH

It is perhaps a bit too easy to get carried away in defining Ray’s swarthy South London milieu. The ‘sarf London’ stuff can be overdone. What struck us most is that he is just such a great painter. He draws with great economy but simultaneously with constant little surprises and technique twists, like oil-wash over conte crayon. The painter he most reminded us of was R B Kitaj but without all the loud Americana. He has Kitaj’s deft outlines and flat colour, but there is almost always that indefinable English tang. The taste of the estuary. 

He is, ultimately, unique. He has gone his own way over a lifetime of painting – as if art trends and theories were just so much pointless hot air, which of course, they are. Never mind the bull terriers, go and see it!

The show ‘Londain’t’ is on at Rogue Gallery, 42 Norman Road, until 10 November. For more information: rogue-gallery.co.uk/exhibits/londaint-by-ray-richardson

There are few things more upsetting than stumbling across a wounded wild animal. A bird with a buckled wing or a car-struck deer can inject a sharp moment of horror into your life. Often you just feel utterly powerless. But there are people you can turn to. RSPCA Mallydams Wildlife Centre, in Fairlight, specialises in the rescue, rehab and release of wounded wildlife. Obviously, treating and caring for our fellow creatures does not come cheap. But there is a way that you can help. The Mudworks ceramics studio, on London Road, is running a raffle to raise funding for the centre.

What makes this fundraising effort so unusual is that the first prize is a totem pole, consisting of wonderfully weird ceramic animal heads, made by members of Mudworks. It is undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary prizes of any raffle we have come across in recent times. The totem pole is of human height and the animal faces that stare at you are strangely gripping: ideal, perhaps, for those with a pagan leaning. Arguably, then, perfect for Hastings and St Leonards.

There is, of course, a darker side to this subject. Many of the animals that Mallydams deal with are the victims of human cruelty. They estimate that in the summer they receive phone calls about cruelty to animals almost every five minutes.It is an ugly truth that the biggest problem wild animals face is human behaviour. But their 55-acre woodland site is a wonderful habitat for recovering small creatures. Understandably, the centre is not open to the public, although educational sessions can be booked. 

The second prize is equally as unusual. It is an animal sculpture by local artist Mark Daniels (also known as Boneys Island). His animal pieces are profound and childlike in equal measure, and very beautiful. To get tickets for this unique raffle, just pop into Mudworks studios – opposite The Tower pub. When you’re there, you’ll probably bump into one of the two wonderful tutors that keep the ceramics studio so vibrant and welcoming: Chantelle and Isabella. Speaking from experience, we can say that these two are excellent tutors. They have fabulous enthusiasm and seemingly endless patience. They certainly helped us go from wonky to vaguely plausible. They offer courses in all aspects of the ceramic craft for anyone – from beginners to those more adept. They’re also offering a sculpture weekend in October, with Suzie Zamit. 

If you care about our furry friends, or even if you just fancy a pagan pole in your backyard, do drop into Mudworks and buy some tickets. The winners will be picked out on 30 September. 

For information about the work of RSPCA Mallydams visit their website. For Mudworks courses, go to themudworks.co.uk

It may surprise you to know that we were not familiar with the writings of Victor Shklovsky. But, after talking to the artist Colin Booth about his forthcoming exhibition at the Electro Studios, we discovered that the Modernist Russian thinker was a key part of his inspiration. Shklovsky argued that the essence of art lay in the process of making the familiar ‘unfamiliar’. (He was nearly made fatally unfamiliar with himself by Stalin in the thirties but managed to be protected by Maxim Gorky.) This obligation to transform has been a key inspiration in Colin’s career. It certainly makes sense of the title: Making Strange. It promises to be a challenging and intriguing show.

EMBRACING SILLY

Booth is very difficult to categorise. It would be possible to label him a Conceptual artist with a dash of Dada and Minimalism. But artists do not need an ingredients label, which can only lead to Art-speak of the most pretentious kind.  Colin is not like that. His work is often funny. His sun-yellow chairs that are never quite level seem like a prop from a silent comedy. The references to children’s bricks and Dinky toys are soaked in childhood memories. In lots of ways his playful approach feels almost like a lament for the way we lose contact with the wonderful silliness of being a child.  

He combines the Modernist love of using found objects – think Duchamp’s Fountain (an old urinal) or Picasso’s bicycle-based Bull’s Head – with the desire to dislocate our complacency about our surroundings.  The cool ambiguity of white is a favoured language. He explains that part of the fascination of a found object – be it off-cuts from a furniture factory or yesterday’s net curtain – is the way that once it is back in the studio it has “latent transformative potential.” In the alchemic dialogue between artist and object, Booth finds ways to whisper other thoughts. In that process there is often a tension between what a thing was and what it is becoming. And even after the artist’s intervention the resultant meaning is not always under control. Materials have their own personality issues and Booth has used everything from marble to neon. Inevitably, Booth’s objects slide their meanings around, leaving emotional and cognitive ripples.

FOR THOSE THAT DO

Colin has been the driving force behind the Electro Studios space for many years now. He has made it a key part of the art scene in St Leonards and Hastings by being so willing to give the space to local working artists. His approach is a long way from gallery-as-museum for big names or dead members of some arbitrary canon. It is for practitioners of art to use. But now, after almost two decades of creating, Booth is taking a fortnight to expose his work to that other most transformative force: the viewer’s gaze.  This show is likely to be a mind-spinner; but as the old poster says, we must Keep St Leonards Strange.    

The show opens on Friday 6 September at 6pm. It continues on Saturday and Sunday, 7-8 September, from 1 to 5pm. The show is also open on the following weekend, 13 – 15 Sept. It is part of the Coastal Currents Festival.  There are also 3 offsite locations: Graze on Grand Parade, Collected Fictions and Black Gull Books on London Road. 

How do you like your horror? Spattered in innocent blood or something more like a demonic beast in your attic? Just how you love to be terrified is, of course, a deeply personal thing. The Project 78 Gallery in Norman Road brings us an exhibition – with the sledgehammer title, The Horror – of four artists, each of whom has gone to the dank basement of their imaginations to give us their take on the fears that sleep within our supposedly sane selves. 

The exhibition is curated by one of the four artists: Tom Banks. Tom is interested in the homes where we live. The places we all see on a stroll, but never quite know what goes on within. For this exhibition he has constructed a number of small models of ordinary houses that seem to emerge from shadows on the gallery walls. The lack of any sign of a human being leaves a sense of places sealed from prying eyes; of lovely homes where norms might get a little perverted. Without so much as a twitching curtain, you have the sense that sometimes an Englishman’s home might be his abattoir.

Daisy Clarke’s work has more of a sense of a dream landscape. Often this has a beguiling sense of pastoral loveliness, but all is not quite what it seems. Little things seem out of kilter: a jay swoops into the foreground but is it a jay with a skull head? Her work invites a narrative reading and then shuts it out. Like all good art, the meaning seems to hover nearby – but never quite lands. It may not be obvious horror, but it cleverly borrows from the tensions of the mode. 

The work of Daniel Bell takes us more directly into the realm of the genuinely creepy. His paintings often depict small mutant creatures: some hybrid thing that probably writhes under your bed. He also exploits video: one piece involved a white box with a peep hole. It is a kind of ‘what the butler saw’ but the flesh you spy on is like a visceral proboscis coming to suck the life out of the butler. Or you. 

If you prefer something a little more enigmatic and teasing, Zack Thorne’s work explores the quotidian. It hints that even in the spaces and objects around us,there is always a sense that they may be hiding something. A big brown wardrobe holds dark space: a view up a darkening staircase suggests someone or something upstairs. Thorne has an interest in horror as a film genre and his work reflects that: each piece feels like a moment in a storyline, leading us to god knows where. 

Tom deserves great credit for the way in which he has put the exhibition together. The pictures come at you in unpredictable jolts. We would also like to thank Beatrice Holdbrook for her great photographs of the event. 

If you want to think inside this little box of horrors, the show is on until July 6.

I suppose you could argue that we are all film makers now. You can just get your phone and maybe with a little thought, make today’s Instagram splash. But, what if you are really interested in making a film, with its guts and complexity? If you want to go beyond wacky or silly or just self-involved, then serious help is at hand. 

In late May the Benbow Arts Space opened its doors in St Leonards. It promises real technical and creative instruction about the strange, complex world of making a film. The Benbow centre is a new creative learning hub that aims to give young people a genuine introduction to the whole gamut of skills and processes that underpin the making of a film. The courses allow students to use high-end kit and receive advice from experienced film makers who really know their stuff, such as Will Davies, the respected local documentary maker from Whalebone films.

The centre is located at number 2 London Road within what used to be the Admiral Benbow pub. The project is being funded by the Bright Foundation charity which established itself in Hastings in 2022 as an educational and artistic resource centre for children, set in a delightful rural setting just minutes out of Hastings. John Bright is an Oscar and Bafta-winning costume designer who has decided to use his knowledge and connections to help young people in this town. In order to fund his projects, he recently held an auction of many of his famous costumes, which raised almost half a million pounds. Notably, Mr Darcy’s white shirt from the film Pride and Prejudice – as worn by a wet Colin Firth in the famous lake scene – sold for £25,000. Inexplicable perhaps, but extremely helpful for the Foundation.

The opening night at the Benbow was a wonderful event with live music, glitzy costumes and a room dedicated to the history of cinema. Along with the twinkly-eyed Bright himself, there were numerous luminaries including renowned international actor Greta Scacchi.

We asked if the Benbow Centre would be turning some young people of Hastings into film stars. That, as you might expect, is not quite the plan. The main idea is to offer people the chance to learn how to take the germ of a filmic idea from inception to final resolution. Genuine film- making is, in many ways, not glamorous at all; it requires planning and consideration of all manner of logistics before the cameras can begin to roll. In short, this is a fantastic opportunity for anyone who has even the vaguest sense that they might be good behind the camera. 

If you have a story to tell,or an issue that you want to zoom in on, this centre could be your means of making it a reality. After all, the Admiral Benbow was the pub in Treasure Island from where Jim Hawkins’ wild adventure began. 

For more information contact office@brightfoundation.org.uk

The world of boxing seems contradictory: brutish yet alive with the metaphorical possibilities of all human struggle. For this reason, perhaps, it has always attracted writers and artists  – think Mailer’s The Fight or Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Some might say that this poetic aspect is all very odd, given that at a basic level, it is about two human animals each trying to beat the other into submission. The renowned photographer and Hastings resident, John Cole, wants to bring us his unique take on this paradoxical realm. 

STRANGELY BEAUTIFUL

Cole is in the process of producing a book of photographs, Shadow Boxers, from his time in and around the New York club boxing scene in the 1970s. It is a world that no longer exists: a grimy, muscular world of contenders and bloodied nearly men; a strangely beautiful theatre of desperate people fighting opponents both real and psychological. 

John explained that he went to New York in 1975 to take up a position as a writer on Newsweek but, as a lover of photography, had been inexorably drawn to local boxing clubs, such as Gleason’s in midtown Manhattan. “It was like entering a black and white movie, a world of real Rockys.” After his immersion in that milieu, he admits that he became “a boxing obsessive” and felt impelled to record it all in that most direct and emotionally intravenous art form that is black and white photography.

John is seeking to raise funds for this project via a Kickstarter campaign. This is not easy. High quality black and white photography in a beautifully designed book is an extremely expensive business.

FIGHTING FOR FIGHTERS

His motivation is not just about the photography itself. He is hoping to donate a portion of the profits to two appropriate causes. First, to the Ringside Charitable Trust, a body that looks after ex-fighters. John points out that there is almost nothing to support old fighters, many of whom suffer physically from the toll of boxing. But he also wants to give funds to the local West Hill Boxing Club: “boxing gives young people confidence and a way of controlling their emotional aggression.” 

There is, of course, quite a debate today about so-called ‘toxic masculinity’ and it is tempting to argue that boxing is one of the ways that testosterone can be channelled. But this is simplistic. It misses the point that women’s boxing is one of the fastest-growing sports in Britain. The truth is, as John argues, boxing is good for all young people because it develops in them two vital qualities; self-confidence and self-discipline. 

THE FIFTEENTH ROUND

Like all artists, John is also motivated by a desire to put his creative work out there. As he puts it, rather beautifully, “It is very important to me to see this body of work published before I reach my fifteenth round.” If you would like to help John see this work come to life, please go to the Kickstarter address below to make a pledge.

Kickstarter.com/projects/shadowboxers/shadow-boxers

You may not have noticed but there is a new mural in town. Head down London Road in St Leonards and just turn left at ‘Della’s Chicken and Burgers’ and, slightly round the corner, you will see it. The man in a hat – with a dash of liminal light blue – plays a Conga drum to the sea, on number 19 South Street. The artist has also left us with an immortal title for this piece: Casa de Conga.

For Hastings to have such an artwork is actually quite something. The designer of the piece is Stern Rockwell, a street artist with an impressive pedigree. Stern grew up in Brooklyn in the 1980s, a place where people refused to accept the grim uniformity of their urban environment. That mentality, it seems, was chemically absorbed into his mind-set. As Rockwell said, “at the age of five, I knew what I was going to do.” He was addicted to drawing from toddlerhood, but perhaps the decisive moment in his artistic evolution occurred in his teens, when his father rescued a flyblown picture frame that included a caricature of Duke Ellington by Al Hirschfeld. Stern was so taken with the curious mix of the apparently casual line and yet perfect delineation of ‘the Duke’, that he took to the idea of expanding that double-edged approach on a much magnified scale.

Out of this Stern arrived, by serendipitous fortune, at a perfect signature style for the zeitgeist. Then, in the odd, slightly cynical way that luxury capitalism works, big fashion companies such as Cartier and Christian Dior wanted a slice of his authenticity. In a way, Stern had drawn the golden ticket, but, despite his great success, he has always remained true to the basic idea that he is just trying to “improve the vibe” of a place.

Strangely, the link between Brooklyn and St Leonards is via Hong Kong. It was here that Stern met Gareth Stevens – renowned percussionist of this town – and they became firm friends, hanging out in the bohemian but distinctly political Club 71, in the dangerous twilight zone before the Chinese crack-down.

Out of this friendship we now have a beautiful visual message. But a message that says what? The Brooklyn boy himself left us all with these ringing words about his days up the scaffold in South Street:

“It’s been a wonderful time in Hastings and I’m sad to leave such a wonderful place with such wonderful people. And so I leave my man, playing his congas to the sea, thanking the Almighty Mother Earth for all the wonderful gifts she offers.”

Given the insanity of the world around us, we should probably take these words as a kind of urban prayer. Or, as Stern said, in rather less overblown words, let’s just hang on “until the next time.” Amen to that.

Unless you are a boxing aficionado, the name Sonny Liston conjures up only a vague idea of a heavyweight slugger from yesteryear. But the recent play at the Stables Theatre, One Night in the Many Deaths of Sonny Liston, manged, rather brilliantly, to bring back to life a man whose tale touched the heights, but was at the same time a tragic struggle against the deadly racism and criminality of urban America in the 1950s and 60s.

The award-winning play, by J B Heaps, adopts an intriguing approach: setting the story on the last night of Liston’s life in December 1970. This is a challenging device because we don’t really know what happened then, except that Liston was found dead in mysterious circumstances. As the title of the play cleverly implies, there are many conspiracy theories about how he may have met his demise, ranging from heart attack to heroin OD administered by the mob. The play offers a twisted sort of answer.

Pablo McFee delivers a brooding, physical performance of a tormented soul nursing a lifetime of resentments. The plot revolves around a glamorous female visitor – played with much simmering ambiguity by Britney Rae – who unexpectedly knocks on Sonny’s door one dark Vegas night. Their sparring dialogue cleverly unfolds much of Liston’s life story, whilst all the time suggesting that neither character is quite what they seem. 

McFee gives us a Liston that is much pained by aspects of his own extraordinary story. We discover that this ex-champion of the World could barely write his name. But perhaps the heart of his tragedy was that America would never let him escape the racist stereotype of a bad and threatening Black man. Incredibly, we find that the veteran civil rights organisation, the NAACP, did not want Liston to be given a shot at the world title because he apparently embodied the ‘bad negro.’ Even President Kennedy was apparently against the proposed title fight with the reigning champion Floyd Patterson because a Liston victory might set back the Civil Rights cause.  

Liston somehow brought together the fears of White America: he had a criminal record, he had mob connections, he was physically intimidating, and his bulldozing boxing style lent itself to loaded words such as ‘beast’ or ‘monster.’

McFee conveyed much of Liston’s supposed menace, and indeed his tenderness, but also captured the poignancy of Liston’s evolving awareness that America would only see him in one reductive and racist way. This was brought home with some anguish when Sonny reflected on what happened on the day after he had knocked out Patterson to become the champ. He returned to Philadelphia expecting huge crowds to welcome him – he even had a speech ready – only to find a handful of jaded reporters. Liston, it seems, could never be embraced by Americans: White or Black. 

The final unwinding of the storyline was testing. I found myself wondering if the playwright hadn’t stretched the plot to snapping point. Having said that, this short play opened up many questions about Liston’s life. But  perhaps its real achievement was to say so much more about what Malcolm X aptly called ‘an American nightmare’.

NICK PELLING looks into a forthcoming action day.

I suspect that most people don’t think being old is a desirable state of being. Oldies tend to get a bad press: they are often seen as doddering, mentally incompetent and fundamentally pre-digital. (If you think you are free of these prejudices, ask yourself whether you think 81-year-old Joe Biden is likely to make a great second-term president.) But, maybe it’s time for a rethink about the last phase of our lives.

Hastings Voluntary Action (HVA) is determined to find ways of countering this casual bigotry. On 20 March, HVA will be holding an interactive workshop which hopes to stimulate meaningful discussion about the issues surrounding ageism as part of an ‘Age Without Limits Action Day’ organised by the national Centre for Ageing Better.

Breaking down negative attitudes won’t be easy. The Centre believes that there needs to be a major cultural shift to escape the old cliches that surround the idea of being old. Above all, they are urging us all to understand that age should not define us, and that there are all manner of ways to embrace ageing. 

The workshop will be hosted by Debby Anderson from HVA and Jessica Duffy from Leeds Older People’s Forum. Jessica hopes that she can share some of the best practice regarding the older community from her experiences in Leeds. But, it’s also hoped that older people in Hastings can get more involved in shaping where they live. 

Apart from opening up a discussion, it is also hoped that, ultimately, Hastings can achieve the status of an ‘Age Friendly Community.’ What, you ask, is an Age Friendly Community? It seems that the idea came from the World Health Organisation and is now promoted by the Centre for Ageing Better in the UK. The benefits of being an AFC include training days and sharing of resources and talents. It seems that no official accreditation is needed to achieve this status, simply political commitment from the Council. 

There are undoubtedly some serious issues facing the older community, but it’s often the negative problems that are stressed: health, social care, financial insecurity, loneliness and boredom. But, arguably, there should be more stress on positive opportunities. For example, HVA is hoping to persuade local firms to pledge to become Age Friendly Employers. Any business taking this pledge would commit to positive practices, such as offering career advancement opportunities at all ages. Older workers, it is argued, should be seen as an asset to any firm, given their experience and maturity. Is it time to reimagine what it means to be old?

You can reserve your spot on the interactive workshop via hastingsvoluntaryaction.org.uk (news) or search on eventbrite.

It’s not often that we hear the voices of the people of St Leonards when contemplating the state of the world today. But film maker and video-journalist Ross Domoney has now launched a podcast, which seeks to weave in the voices and opinions of locals as it explores what he calls the “sci-fi-like quality of contemporary politics”. The podcast is called Shadowgraph and although it is undoubtedly political it is very different from the mainstream matter of fact, and supposedly ‘balanced’, news that so often just sends us around in circles of despair. The idea is to reach out for the foggy, almost fictional, worlds that sit in between creative video-journalism and hard documentary. It is an unusual and slightly weird sounding project so we met up with Ross to ask what it was all about. 

IMAGINING THE FUTURE

Ross starts from the idea that most of us currently feel “overwhelmed by the current political chaos.” He adds that he is trying to find a “new language” to help us engage our imaginations as well as our analytical brains. He hopes the podcast will help people navigate the bleakness by developing a more “nuanced” style of political storytelling which looks for almost unconscious connections. 

The central paradox of Ross’s approach, it seemed to us, is that he is hoping that elements of fantasy might help us not to ‘escape’ world news but to get under the skin of the modern ‘spectacle’ of madness. In some ways he is asking us to imagine a future, whilst hinting that the future is already here. 

Part of the idea is to allow ourselves to dream forward and anticipate where current flows of history are taking us. A recent podcast of Shadowgraph looks at the possibility of a General Strike in 2035, as a desperate response to a system that is barely functioning on a planet that is apparently determined to pass its own judgement on late capitalism. In this future the usual sources of resistance, such as the labour unions, are powerless because traditional work itself is becoming impossible. This may sound like your everyday apocalypse, but the twist is that Ross brings in contemporary voices. A random local opined that this hostile ‘nature’ was annoyed with us for “chatting all the time”.

The people of the town become almost actors in this imagined future. Recently he invited people into his intentionally blacked out home to explore what it might be like to be in a climate lockdown, in a dark but creative role play. The podcast comes with a disturbing soundscape that helps the listener engage in an all too possible reality. 

AN UNCERTAIN WORLD

Ross is certainly an unusual character. How many people do you know who, upon hearing the news of war breaking out in Ukraine, decide that the best course of action would be to journey to Kyiv with a camera to ask commuters on trains what they dream about in their sleep? Just as the Russians were closing in on the capital. But, this is the essence of the Shadowgraph storytelling style: taking you into an other-worldly experience of the news through inventive storytelling. As if delving into the unconscious reality of people might shed light on actual reality. 

You might think that someone so committed to looking into the hearts of darkness would be a serious and stern, bearded Hemingway-type. But that would be way off beam. Ross is a very approachable and open creative who has taught practical workshops in filmmaking in Hastings and St Leonards. 

If all this sounds a little strange, that is probably because it is. Shadowgraph offers a challenge to think about the world in different ways. I’m not sure we have fully comprehended it. We can only suggest that you check it out for yourself!

Shadowgraph is offering online and in-person workshops to teach this very unique style of storytelling. www.shadowgraph.co. 

As we all know, going on a real person-to-person ‘date’ is full of potential embarrassment and enough social awkwardness to turn otherwise mature people into cringing, stumbling beings who have lost the power of intelligent speech. Hastings Art School, however, has hit upon a new way to ease the pain and even have a lot of fun. Their genius idea is doodle-based speed-dating.

To get a little more clarity we spoke to the Director of Hastings Art School, Julia Kotziamani. She was quite frank with us: “Sometimes art can take itself really seriously, second only perhaps to dating! We want to create an upbeat, relaxed environment where you can meet new people and engage in a silly creative activity. Drawing can be a great way to break the ice and connect in a lighthearted way.”

MY SILLY VALENTINE

So, what, in practice, are we talking about here? It seems that those that go along to what is described as “a fun and flirty event” will be given drawing paper and pencils or charcoal and randomly sat down opposite another ‘date’. There will then follow a two-minute drawing session based around silly prompts. “Silly” seems to be one of Julia’s favourite words and that sort of approach certainly takes a lot of the tensions out of any encounter. 

The prompts are along these lines: “draw your date as an animal” or “draw your date made only of squares or triangles”. You can imagine that this sort of thing will probably lead to some hilarity. The situation might be a little more controversial with the prompt,”exaggerate your date’s best feature”. This instruction is potentially a bit upsetting, in an unintentional sort of way, but maybe not. Maybe it’s an opportunity to flatter. To rephrase Richard Hell and the Voidoids, perhaps “love comes in doodles”. After the two minutes of drawing, there is an opportunity for the two ‘dates’ to discuss each other’s likely weird drawings.

Because it is speed-dating, each moment of artistic intimacy is quickly over. Beer and snacks are provided – along with non-alcoholic alternatives – so it’s probable that even the most bizarre drawings will generate a laugh. It should be added that you do not have to be any kind of artist in order to participate. In the world of doodle-dating there are no art critics or pompous lecturers. 

DOODLERS JUST WANT TO HAVE FUN

All of the sketchy lovers are free to do what they want with their drawings: take them home, throw them in the bin or give them to someone who caught their eye, perhaps. Julia was very clear that all the school can guarantee is possible “new friends and fun”. Anything else is “up to you”.

Hastings Art School describes itself as an “alternative to a traditional art school model”. One of its primary aims is to help local artists. They run a 30-week, 3-term programme designed to help people develop skills and challenge themselves. There are no specific entry requirements and the fees are defined loosely as “accessible”.

The school is obviously very serious about its mission, but the doodle-dating is surely a wonderful gift to would-be lovers and scribblers everywhere. I think it was the venerable old Jazz philosopher, Humphrey Lyttelton who said,”we should never lose sight of silly”. What Julia and the school have come up with is, to our way of thinking, a veritable triumph of silly, with added love hearts.

Have you ever heard of Charles Dawson? I suspect not. He was a well respected Victorian gent who was brought up in St Leonards and later became one of the bewhiskered, worthy founders of the Hastings Museum and Art Gallery in 1892. So far, so boring. But it seems he was also a hugely successful con man, responsible for one of the great hoaxes of the early 20th century.

In 1912 Dawson ‘discovered’ an ancient skull that seemed to be the ‘missing link’ between ape and man. This became known as the Piltdown Man; it sealed Dawson’s reputation as one of the great amateur scientists of his time; a reputation that lasted far beyond the end of his life in 1916. It might be slightly embarrassing for the town, but one of the key founders of the Museum, was essentially an inventor of archaeological lies. So, who was this esteemed gentleman faker?

Charles Dawson was brought up in St Leonards in the later nineteenth century and became a well regarded solicitor, but most importantly, he also became an amateur paleontologist and antiquarian. He built up quite a collection of supposedly ancient artifacts, such that he was welcomed into the Sussex Archaeological Society and was soon giving ‘important’ academic papers about his ‘finds.’ 

A VERY BRITISH HUMANOID

His already growing reputation escalated into national fame when, in 1912, he ‘discovered’ the skull in a ditch in the tiny hamlet of Piltdown. Dawson claimed that the skull fragments were in fact the ‘missing link’ in the evolutionary chain: the skull was apparently the vital evidence of the transition from Ape to Man. (That such a transitional link might one day be found had been a Victorian supposition ever since Darwin’s evolutionary ideas were largely accepted.) Absurdly, the notion that the first half-humanoid should turn out to be British made the public seize on the story with nationalist glee.

From this discovery onwards, Dawson was seen as probably the best amateur scientist in Britain: in the dusty realm of bits of old bone and pottery, he was a sort of tweedy celebrity. When he died in 1916, he was still ‘a great man’.

You might assume that such a genteel fraudster would essentially be an unpleasant chap, but that does not seem to be true. A fellow archaeologist from the Natural History Museum, Arthur Smith Woodward, said he was a “delightful colleague” and Dawson’s wife, Helene, said he was “the best and kindest man who ever lived” .

RATHER RUBBISH FAKERY

It took forty years for the archaeological world to prove, definitively, that the skull was fake. In fact, modern forensics revealed that the skull was something of a bodge job: it was a combination of half a medieval human skull and an Orangutan’s jaw, with some crudely filed down teeth to make it fit. In many ways, the hoax is a piece of rather rubbish fakery. 

Why did the apparently upstanding member of the Hastings community stoop so low? Perhaps Dawson can be seen as just another of this town’s eccentrics. He does not appear to have been a bad person or even a profiteer. He has been described by the historian Miles Russell as “a genial Jekyll and Hyde”: a loveable enthusiast whose genuine love of antiquities pulled him into inventing that which he passionately hoped to find. Later research also found that many of the artifacts that he generously donated to Hastings Museum were a bit dodgy. The Museum now has a little display about the whole curious tale. But why this man of science chose to betray his calling remains mysterious and probably always will. 

The shiny black box of the Hastings Contemporary that graces The Stade in Old Town might be beautifully designed, but does it actually provide much for the people of this town? We went along to meet the Director of Programmes, Leah Cross, to ask the pressing Pythonian question: what has the Hastings Contemporary ever done for us? Leah is a charismatic and persuasive young woman who exudes a sense of mission. She informed us that the gallery is determined to offer something for “all age groups” for the town, within what they call the ‘Pearls of the Sea’ programme. This diverse programme is a constantly evolving portfolio of playful activity sessions, art classes and creative workshops. It should be stressed that the workshops are often led by local artists; indeed the gallery is very keen to build up its list of local artists who might like to offer their skills. 

A FISHY WORLD

Given the location of the gallery, among the black fishing huts, it’s perhaps not surprising that the various workshops on offer have been given fishy names. The sessions on the second Wednesday of every month, for example, are for the so-called ‘sprats’. These are for babies, up to 18 months, which seek to help the little ones explore their sensory responses. Parents are shrewdly warned that, “It could get messy.” The very attempt to regard babies as proto-artists seemed quite something to us.

Toddlers, up to four years, have their own one-hour session on the second Saturday of every month. Leah relished the fact that toddler artists can be quite anarchic; the gallery is very happy to allow mess and chaos to accompany creativity. Indeed, Leah told us about a particular episode of toddler mayhem – it involved the slow destruction of a cardboard submarine – with a big smile on her face. 

There are also classes for 5-10 year-olds known as ‘brill’, and one for young artists aged 11-16. Perhaps sensibly, the teenagers – given their propensity for disapproval of all adult ideas – are not given a fishy name. 

FINDING THE FREE SPIRIT

A key aspect of the gallery’s programme is ‘Family Day’, every Thursday in the school holidays, in which parents can share the creative experience with their children. Last October the gallery put on the ‘Big Draw’ workshop which prompted children to interact with drawings by Quentin Blake. The aim and, to some extent, the achievement, was to get children drawing and colouring in Blake’s free-spirited fashion. 

Leah was keen to point out that all the classes and Family Days are carefully constructed to tie in with whatever exhibitions are currently on. For example, the current exhibition by Roland Hicks, The Fourth Wall – which features his slightly eccentric barrier-like structures – will be the inspiration for a forthcoming Family Day when children and older family members will be encouraged to make their own 3D assemblages out of found objects and everyday bits and pieces that might not normally be seen as art materials.

SMASH INTO COLOUR

Occasionally, Leah allows, the workshops can get pretty noisy. She remembers one printing class in which children were allowed to borrow stones from the beach and use them to smash plants into calico cloth. The pigments explode from the greenery but, of course, the sound and sights of kids smashing stones down again and again was a bit disconcerting for bewildered visitors.

The gallery also has an out-reach programme involving making links with local schools. This often entails going into schools to work with and, with luck, inspire the children. But, schools also bring groups in: one local school is apparently bringing in a GCSE group to film a dance piece in the big gallery.

SIP AND DRAW LIFE

For older members of the Hastings’ community, there are all sorts of adult classes. There are the enticing ‘Sip and Draw’ life drawing classes when a little bit of wine or beer might help to remove inhibitions or fear of failure. Other options include skills-based classes, such as still-life painting, but also art history classes. Again, the aim is to find connections with Hastings and the seafront surrounding the gallery; art inspired by the beach, real and imagined. 

The seafront location is very important to the gallery. They have links with the local fishing community and have used that world as an inspiration for workshops. And they are hoping to work with the RNLI to help the venerable institution with its bicentenary celebrations on the beach this year

UNDERFUNDED

A criticism often leveled at the gallery is that all these offerings have to be paid for, and that certainly cannot be denied. The Towner Gallery in Eastbourne and the De La Warr Pavilion, by contrast, regularly have free exhibitions and access. However, the gallery’s Communication Officer, Sophia McNab, pointed us to figures that show that the Hastings Contemporary does not receive anywhere near the amount of Arts Council funding as their south coast artsy cousins. In fact, the Towner has about three times the amount of funding as the Contemporary and the De La Warr receives about four times as much. Not for the first time in matters south eastern, Hastings finds itself the poor relation. 

Nevertheless, the gallery tries very hard to keep prices down and offers multiple concessions, particularly for locals. For example, the people of Hastings and St Leonards can get into the gallery at half price (£5) and all under 18s are free. There are also concessions for the disabled, carers, unemployed, students and, in the future, the gallery hopes to help children who receive free school meals attend workshops and get a meal for free.

A FLEDGLING RELATIONSHIP 

What Leah makes particularly clear is that the gallery is constantly evolving its community programme. The whole ‘Pearls of the Sea’ cycle of events is only in its second year and as Leah says, it is still “at a fledgling stage”. The gallery is trying very hard to find out what works and doesn’t work for the people of Hastings. They spend a lot of time surveying the opinions of those that attend anything at the gallery. They are, in effect, attempting to strengthen their relationship with the citizens of this creative town.

It is a relationship that is very important to the gallery. For example, the gallery depends upon a roster of about 50 volunteers to help out and most of them are locals. Overall, we had the impression that the gallery is finding a new way forward which is built upon the idea of getting closer to the local community. As Leah said, quite forcibly, the aim is to be “not just in Hastings but for Hastings”. It will be quite a challenge but, undoubtedly, the small devoted team that run the gallery are moving things in the right direction.

The Pearls of the Sea is the name of the Youth and Schools programme only.

If you have ever attempted the lonely craft of writing a short story or a poem, you will know how easy it is to be defeated by self doubt and maybe even suffer from a slight sense of embarrassment. The Hastings Writers Workshop (HWW) offers a great way to overcome these bedevilling snares.

The workshops are run by James Young, a successful Irish writer who brings charisma and clear structure to the group sessions. He is a specialist in short fiction and even edits the Short Fiction Journal. I can personally vouch for the inspirational and thought-provoking nature of these classes; I attended a ten-week class last year. The great thing about the course was the way, each week, we looked at a different aspect involved in creative writing, such as shifting points of view and voice and much more. In addressing these literary mechanics, we were given some quite challenging pieces to read and analyse. The following week the group would discuss the issues arising.

AVOIDING THE IRRELEVANT

The danger with free roaming discussion is, of course, the tendency of creative types to meander off into the conversational backwoods of irrelevance. But James is particularly effective – in the most gentle and diplomatic fashion – in letting people know they should probably stick to the point, or pipe down. 

He also keeps the group small in number – around eight or so – which leads to an intimate and trusting atmosphere: this is vital as each week people also receive feedback on their own creative efforts. After a while, you realise that even trenchant criticism is coming from a shared sense of creative endeavour. 

This time around, HWW is offering a range of courses located in their new home in the Palace Workshop in the old Debenhams building. All the courses are ten weeks in duration. In addition to the first level course, there are further workshops for those that want to continue their explorations after the initial course and there is also an ‘advanced’ course.   

EXCITING EXPERIMENTS

This year there are also some exciting new departures for the HWW. James says he is “very excited to announce that we will be offering two courses from the brilliant Jen Calleja, author of the verse novel Vehicle.” ‘New Perspectives on Poetry’ and ‘Adventures in Experimental Fiction’ will begin in February. If you are interested in ways to subvert the traditional structures of literature, or if you just want to get your head around what is sometimes called metafiction, this could be for you. Calleja has been shortlisted for the Man Booker International prize, so HWW has pulled off quite a coup in getting this young writer to share some of her methods and outlook.   

The cost of these courses is generally £190 for the ten weeks. If you are looking for a way to kick-start your creative self this year, this could be money well spent. Looking back on my experiences, I have to say that I agree with a fellow workshopper who said, “the course rapidly became the highlight of my week.”

To find out more about the courses, go to hastingswritersworkshop.com

Around this rather bloated time of year, many people begin to think about self-improvement schemes, like joining a gym. The cynical amongst us say that most people will probably go for about three weeks and then slump back on to the sofa and crack open the Pringles. We went along to Summerfields Leisure Centre, on Bohemia Road, to have a look at what is on offer and see whether there is any hope for us over-indulgent sinners. On the reception desk, we found Linda Moon, a most warm and welcoming front of house. 

Linda has worked at Summerfields for 21 years. Impressively, she seems to know everyone that comes and goes. She is particularly good with young children, overburdened young mums and bouncy oldsters. As she says, “I have watched kids grow up here.” It certainly seemed that lots of young mums drop in for the tumble-tots sessions and genuinely value Linda’s engaging, good humoured and caring disposition. Indeed, it was noticeable that many of the staff seemed to enjoy working in such a sociable environment.

SURVIVAL OF THE AQUAFIT

Linda explained to us that there is an extraordinary amount on offer in this leisure centre. Alongside the standard gym sessions, there are so many other ways to flex the flesh. You could try Stretch and Tone, or, if you are not a gym person, you could try Aquafit in the pool, yoga or Pilates, or even more exotic sounding exertions such as Drums Alive or Zumba. If you feel a bit more of a need to release some post-festive frustrations, you could try the Freedom Combat Class. 

Almost all of these classes are run by a professional tutor. If you feel that you might be embarrassed to jump around in front of others, the centre does make it very clear that their classes are for ‘all levels of fitness’. All you need to do is turn up in something comfy and bring some rehydration fluid – sometimes known as water. 

It should also be pointed out that you can enter the classes on a pay-on-the-day basis. For example, it’s £7 for a single gym session or £5.50 for a swim. But there are also membership options that offer concessionary rates, including a very reasonable annual membership rate.

I decided to join the gym myself – Helen Murphy decided not to join and expressed the opinion that I would never stick to it. The gym room is perhaps best if you want to just stay in your own headspace and not have to be sociable. Personally, I don’t like to perspire and turn beetroot in group gatherings: it seems I prefer – for some reason – to focus only on pedalling a stationary bicycle to nowhere. 

LETS GET (A BIT) PHYSICAL

However, for those that say all this exertion is usually futile, we beg to differ. Looking at the steady flow of people who come in and out of the foyer and listening to Linda’s hellos and goodbyes, we both had the distinct sense that this place offers a social service: a kind of cross between a community drop-in and a place to just reconnect with your bodily self. 

Obviously, people need self-discipline and commitment, but Summerfields is not the kind of place where iron-pumping fitness fascists seek to make everyone feel inadequate. It is more like an all-embracing arena for anyone to make a new start in a new year.  

Something extraordinary is happening at the junction of Pevensey and London Roads. Something almost heroic, perhaps. Four years ago, one man bought the collapsing Victorian church, without being quite sure why. For almost four years he has been hammering and drilling and bashing away in a world of dust: entombed under Pevensey Road, lost to normal life. We went to see him, tiptoeing around the power tools, to try to make sense of this exceptional mission. 

In conversation, Chris Ostwald seems perfectly sane. He explains, he went to a property auction in London and just couldn’t resist bidding. He came away the proud owner of St Leonards  Congregational  Church, a building – at the time of purchase – that was more of a home to dry-rot, woodworm and drug addicts than to the almighty. Chris reflects with a smile how a local, watching him sweat to install antique Welsh railway railings, told him he was “as mad as a hatter”. 

Chris took us on a tour around the church. The thing that strikes you is just how much work he has done and is doing. And will be doing. 

RESTORING NOT RIPPING OUT

A casual observer of the goings-on might think this is the activity of a developer on the make, perhaps hoping to jam some ugly flats into the Victorian shell. But the admirable thing about Chris’s approach is that he wants to keep the purity of the old church but carefully and subtly repurpose it for the benefit of the Community. In fact, at present, he hopes to create a space in the under-church for a market, a café and even a small cinema. Upstairs in the church itself, he hopes to save the authentic surroundings as a beautiful but secular venue for weddings, and a space for all manner of community meetings. 

Surprisingly, when he started, Chris did not really have a plan: he fell in love with the building and its possibilities and he is still working those out. What is clear is that he is not really in this for profit – and he has yet to find a source of external funding, despite contacting people like Historic England. He says he just finds “the journey” exciting and wants to create something that the town will enjoy and use. 

His personal story is intriguing. He went straight from school into Pinewood Studios and eventually became a skilled maker and crafter in the world of special effects. He is quite proud to say that he worked with Jim Henson and the Muppets team and on the blockbuster Flash Gordon. He was also actually the man responsible for making the monstrous plant in the film version of Little Shop of Horrors. But the advent of CGI left him a bit disillusioned: “You might as well put a tennis ball on a stick and let the computer nerds do the rest.” He diversified into antiques and running London-based cafes, but his incredible constructive skills stayed with him – alongside a striking willingness to teach himself new skills from YouTube!

A MERRY BAND

It should be clarified that Chris has not been entirely alone in his efforts. He has been ably supported by a handful of fellow travellers. When we visited, the charismatic local filmmaker, Jamie De Ath, was engaged in cheerily running a festive market selling Christmas trees and gifts. Upstairs we came across Nigel Woodford, a skilled stone mason who is doing an incredibly impressive job in lovingly and authentically preserving the exquisite Victorian stained glass windows. Between them all, Chris Jamie and Nigel, they seemed a merry band of believers, quietly doing something absolutely amazing.  This is a story with much still to be told; watch this space.

What does the concept of vintage clothing actually mean? Some might think it is just second-hand stuff, coming round again; aimed at people who find nostalgic costumery a cosy escape from grim modernity and maybe – for some of our readers – it might be thought frippery in tough times. But, arguably, carefully selecting from the past’s wardrobe is an art form. One such style curator is undoubtedly Donna Grimaldi: the new queen of classic vintage in Old Town. 

Earlier this year Donna set up her vintage clothing shop, Bobby and Dandy, in George Street, moving here after a decade or so in Brighton. It has to be admitted that there are a lot of vintage types around in Hastings (we don’t mean old people) but Donna’s approach is distinctive and discerning. As she says, “all the clothes are hand-picked from around the world.” Her shop is certainly an interesting mix: a veritable treasure trove in what feels like a fashion cave. If you are into Americana stylings, French peasant workwear (not for wearing to actual work, of course) or just exploring the fashion landscapes from the 1940s through to the 1980s, it is definitely worth a visit.

DAYS AND NIGHTS AT THE CIRCUS

Donna told us she had always had “a feeling” for retro stuff. She developed a real love for the 80s look and sound – partly due to an older brother – even though she is far too young to have experienced it first-hand. But, it seems that she was not always set on a course into the sartorial past. In fact, her career track has been most unusual. She studied psychology in her twenties and for a while, worked as a support worker in mental health. But, even then, she was always collecting vintage at home and selling it privately. The pull of the fashion world eventually led to a course of study. But her steps after that were not always predictable. Extraordinarily, at one point, she found herself joining the circus! 

This was the real thing: she lived in a traditional small circus caravan, worked on the costumes, and travelled from town to town in the old school manner. Donna even performed as part of the circus finale as a cabaret-style sailor gal. It was in some ways a tough life with none of life’s comforts – not so much as an oven or a fridge. And yet, as she says, “I didn’t mind it at all.” (Aptly, Donna is also a major fan of Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus.)

A NEW PLANET 

Donna is clearly a resilient, beguiling and flexible operator; she was even briefly in an electro-synth band. But her passion for fashion has always been her main mooring. Her vintage offerings have, in recent years, attracted much attention. Bobby and Dandy has been covered by quite a swishy range of magazines: Forbes, Conde Nast, the Sunday Telegraph and many more. She has provided costumes for several television shows, such as Sex Education and Bridgerton. All of that can seem like a world away, but her commitment to Hastings Old Town is quite palpable. She argues that Hastings is now “more interesting and eccentric than Brighton.” When we asked if she was worried about all the competition between the vintage shops of Hastings, she commented that “there are many different ways to do vintage” and that the variety of outlets “simply helps to make this town a destination”. Evidently, fashionistas everywhere like to time-travel and now, in Old Town, they have a new planet to visit. 

The Bright Foundation is a remarkable place. It is situated in 24 acres of beautiful land, Rodgers Farm, but it is only a few minutes out of central Hastings. It was set up last year with the aim of offering a cultural resource that schools and parents might access; something unique for the children of Hastings, regardless of background. The site has a theatre, a toy museum, dolls’ houses, replete with antique dolls, a café and a vista of ducks on the pond. It is in many ways a magical place; a perfect venue to connect with the elusive, wintry spirit of Christmas.

A PARROT FOR CHRISTMAS

This Christmas the whole building has been given the yuletide touch. There is a Christmas trail and a very unique Santa, apparently assisted by a parrot – it seems that the Hastings piratical tradition has seeped into the festive tale. But most importantly, the Foundation brings us ‘Christmas Tales From Around the World,’ performed in the delightful Barn Theatre, by the deeply charismatic Pablo McFee. 

Pablo says that he wants to explore the oral tradition of storytelling to bring us old tales in new ways. He wants to examine how Christmas might be seen from different cultural perspectives, such as that of displaced people or even animals. Children are welcome to bring a toy, which may well become part of the story. 

Pablo also explained that he has always had a feeling for festive drama ever since he played Joseph in his primary school nativity. He added that another key experience was a visit to Pollock’s Toy Museum in London with its beguiling puppet shows. After that, the impulse to explore the art of storytelling was indelibly printed on his imagination. In later life, he developed his talents in various theatre groups, such as the Half Moon Theatre, the L’ouverture Theatre Company and the Royal Court.

A MAN FOR THE SEASON

Pablo is also a very considerable musician; in fact, he is a man of many talents – an actor, musician, dancer and educator. He has played real-life characters as diverse as the self-destructive Shane McGowan of the Pogues and world champion boxer Sonny Liston, the latter being a role he will reprise at the Stables Theatre next year. He seems equally at home within the profoundly serious or the offbeat and lyrical. He certainly has that ability to bring things to life: children can expect a treat with his unique angle on the Christmas tales. 

The Bright Foundation was set up last year by the Academy Award-winning costume designer, John Bright. He was keen to bring something to the town that might allow the children of Hastings to experience something of the magic and limelight of the performative world and he has certainly done that.

ADMIRAL BENBOW SAILS AGAIN?

The latest exciting venture of the Foundation is to give St Leonards a new arts space. They have taken over the site of the old Admiral Benbow pub near the bottom of London Road. They intend to offer a creative space for the community. At the time of writing, we are not quite sure how the old pub building will be used but it will apparently be open in the spring and we look forward to discovering more. 

In the meantime, we look forward to finding new angles on familiar tales with Mr McFee.

For tickets and info go to thebrightfoundation.org.uk

We should admit something: we thought Pilates was just another variant of yoga, probably a branch of transcendental PE first inscribed on palm leaves by a flexible Brahman eleven thousand years ago. We were so wrong. In fact, Pilates was created by a twentieth-century German ex-boxer – Joseph Pilates – who became a prisoner of war in a British camp during the Great War. Whilst interned he developed a system of exercise that kept him in incredible shape. Inspired by this, and the fact that we are feeling a bit decrepit – knees not working and weird foot-swelling issue – we decided to give it a go and so we enrolled in an introductory class. 

TRAINING WITH THE QUEEN

To be honest, we struck lucky. Our teacher was Claire Mason, from Pink Star Pilates in St Leonards, and she proved to be a brilliant tutor. We spoke to her after our last class to see how she got into the highly toned world of Pilates. She said that it all started when she fell over about fifteen years ago and broke her arm. The rehabilitation programme involved Pilates and she was smitten. She then undertook training in London under the guidance of a woman that The Times has called “the Queen of Pilates”, Lynne Robinson. 

As a teacher, Claire manages to be both quite precise but also sensitive to individual weaknesses or health issues. She took us through all the basics, carefully explaining that posture and breathing come first but also that the exercises gradually develop core strength. It’s not really about feeling the burn, more about getting your spine and your muscular system to mesh together. The key is not masochistic agony but listening to your body. Turns out bodies have a lot to say. 

ROLLING AND UNROLLING

You don’t need a lot of equipment: a mat is enough, and Claire provides them if you don’t have one of your own. She is very good at demonstrating each move, many of which have memorable names like ‘the Cobra’, and then she will offer you little bits of advice as you attempt to become a human reptile. Actually, ‘the Cobra’ and ‘the Cat’ are extremely good at rolling and unrolling your vertebrae, and after class you can genuinely feel your body in a different sort of way. Bits of you that you don’t normally use are brought into the moves. 

Claire is keen to point out that Pilates is not about losing weight: it is not a fat-burning sort of exercise. And it’s not about spiritual enlightenment. It doesn’t come with all that mystical baggage. It’s much more focused on the body as a piece of complex engineering that needs regular attention – little and often.

A WHOLE NEW BODY?

She does admit that you can become a little obsessed with it. Her partner says she sometimes becomes the “posture police” – keen to critique anyone and everyone’s bodily composure. It’s certainly easy to see how you can become obsessed with Pilates. Joseph Pilates claimed that “in ten sessions you will feel the difference, in twenty you will see the difference and in thirty you will have a whole new body.” We don’t seem to have whole new bodies just yet, but it is certainly true that it boosts your mood, and to be honest we have only done four classes so far – so maybe we just need to be patient.

What we can say is that Claire is a wonderful teacher, mixing good humour with a sharp focus on the overall aim. Perhaps the biggest compliment we can give is that we have signed up for more sessions, en route to bodily perfection.

When you think of British painters of the 1950s and early 1960s, there is a tendency to think of the bohemian Soho crowd who swirled around Francis Bacon in what became known simply as Muriel’s Bar. The trail of great paintings, love triangles, alcoholism and suicides, of which their lives seem to consist, can make you think all of these painters are best defined by their commitment to carnality.

BAGGY JUMPERS

However, some of the painters of that era were not hanging out in paint-spattered baggy jumpers in a vortex of gay sex and bebop noise. In amongst this band of hedonists and self-destroyers, there were some painters who just quietly stuck to their craft. One such painter was David Tindle, an artist who – whilst strongly attracted to the magnetic personalities of Bacon, Lucien Freud, Keith Vaughan and John Minton – stayed true to his own vision. Russell Baker and Olga Mamonova have undeniably pulled off quite a coup in putting together a retrospective of the work of this important, but rather neglected, survivor of that volatile period. 

Russell told us of the time when he spotted Tindle outside his Kino gallery in 2009 and invited him in; “as two northerners we immediately hit it off.” Russell remains a friend and has even visited him in his current home in Italy. Baker says that he feels “privileged” to hear David’s tales from the almost mythic Baconian world. Whilst myth and fact may not always coincide, it is certainly true that this friendship has brought us a remarkable show. 

LEAVING THE PROVINCES

David Tindle was born in the very unbohemian town of Huddersfield. He later studied at the Coventry School of Art and might very well have remained a little-known provincial painter in such environs. But in 1951 at the age of 19 he took a gamble. He moved to London and found work as a set painter in West End theatres. He was quite well regarded as such but what seems to have changed his fortunes was an out-of-character decision to reach out to quite a well known London painter, John Minton. Minton was both a great painter and an aesthetic networker. For whatever reasons he took to Tindle. 

Minton knew how to connect Tindle to the right people. In 1954 Tindle achieved his breakthrough exhibition at the Piccadilly Gallery. The gallery was run by the slightly snooty gentleman collector Godfrey Pilkington, scion of the great glass manufacturing family. Pilkington hated the fashion for abstract work that was seeping into London from New York. Tindle was a realist and one can only assume Pilkington welcomed him as a very British antidote to American splatter.

NOT WHAT IT SEEMS

Tindle is still painting today at the age of 91 and, inevitably, a retrospective that covers at least seven decades leaves a sense of shifting concerns. His work in the fifties displays the influence of early Lucien Freud. The deeply meditative Broken Egg Shell, painted in 1954, has the sharp kitchen-sink silent realism of Freud’s Girl with a White Dog, from 1952. But the kitchen is not quite what it seems. It comes freighted with a curious atmosphere. As in so much of his work, people are absent but feel just out of the painterly camera. Works such as Blue Bed Sheets and Pillowcase carry a sense of a human bed story just hanging in the air.

Rachel Cooke, in the Guardian, was also onto a truth about Tindle when she spoke of his tendency to “play with realism”. The scene of an unpeopled room, in the subdued style of a Gwen John, is familiar but almost too normal. Tindle himself felt that his work had a sense of a time half-remembered: of quiet moments slipping away.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN PAINT

The later work, such as Two Young Women and a Stray Dog, from 2017, have a feeling of distant viewing: like long swathes of contemplation on canvas. The painting style is somehow both thinner and deeper. No matter how one interprets the work, the wonderful exhibition brings you a kind of journey through a painter’s life. As you wander around Kino, upstairs and downstairs, you slowly realise that you are inside one man’s total commitment to painting. An autobiography in shades. 

The exhibition continues at Kino in Norman Road until 28 January 2024

In these weird times it is very easy to feel that the whole world is sliding towards something awful. The apocalypse narrative is everywhere. The planet is burning up, the Middle East is devouring itself, Russia has a madman at the helm, Artificial Intelligence is going to turn into the ultimate Frankensteinian monster and Rishi Sunak thinks he is the ‘change’ candidate. It is very easy with this menu of horror simply to say, “a plague on all your houses” and maybe take up pottery. 

Killing The Helephant

And below this atmosphere of mega-crises there seems to be a low blizzard of petty irritations. One of the more micro-grievances that has been recently getting on my nerves emerged during the recent slow death of the white elephant formerly known as High Speed Two or HS2. During the endless painful debates about this poor beast, it began to become clear that no one is sure exactly how to pronounce the letter aitch. Some go for ‘Haitch’ and some for ‘Ay-tch.’ How can we expect to run a country if no one can agree on how one of the letters of our alphabet is actually pronounced? Personally, I think it should be pronounced with an A not an H. Try saying ‘NHS’ to yourself. Other nations such as Ireland or France may make their own linguistic arrangements, of course.

And there is the tedious debate about when the next election might be. Who really cares? But for info: all the elections since Thatcher won in 1979 have been in spring or early summer, except one. The odd one out was, of course, Boris Johnson’s December election in 2019 when the whole nation was so drunk it voted for the Christmas Con-man. But, normally, governments seem to believe that early summer is the time when people might feel an idiotic sunstruck optimism and vote for the status quo. So, Sunak will surely, similarly look for the sun.

Rocking With The Undead

And on top of all this, the Rolling Stones still stagger on. What are we to make of this? Maybe it’s just another omen of oblivion. But honestly, what is the point of these wizened millionaires clunking out some more rock cliches? On the other hand I suppose, it is kind of all of a piece with our out-of-sync times: what could be weirder than that these trailblazers of youth rebellion should now be the undead rocking us into the end times.

Obviously, we have no saviours to turn to. But even despair has time off. In a moment of weakness last week, I began to wonder if, just possibly, there was a man. 

SOMETIMES THERE’S A MAN

As the voiceover says in the Big Lebowski: “Sometimes there’s a man.” And, as improbable as it sounds, possibly that man is Keir Rodney Starmer. I know that this very dull but worthy bloke is no one’s idea of a revolutionary, but then, maybe, as the youthful Stones said: “Sometimes you get what you need.” We need a decent person who does not lie, does not make up shit on the hoof a la Boris and who may be genuinely concerned to help ordinary people. To believe in service. Maybe.  On the other hand, I can personally vouch for the fact that there is a great pottery course at Mudworks on the London Road.  

JEMIA DE BLONDEVILLE

On average

I delete a minimum

Of about 50 emails per day

350 per week

About 1,500 per month

18,000 per year

And approximately

200,000 per decade

So I was thinking

If about 4 billion people

Around the world

Averaged about the same

200,000 times 4 billion

Unwanted emails

Floating around

Like lost ghosts

Wandering around hyperspace

Clogging up

A non-existent void

Words, and numbers

Along with brackets, commas, and full stops

Lies, and truths

All thrown in together

A hodge podge

Now all equal

As rejects of humanity

Discarded

Tears flowing, along with other words

Numbers unite, and subtract

And interact

Then divide

There then follows an algebraic orgy

There is much multiplication

The letter O falls in love with zero

And circles join in

For this narcissistic

Ménage à trois

Nothing is the outcome

And nothing happens….

Have you ever felt like you were sort of fading away? Like Paul Simon: slip sliding away. Not just the fade of yesterday’s youthful bloom, but the shrivelling of individuality under the digital all-seeing eye. The current exhibition of works by the acclaimed artist Matthew Radford seems, at least in part, to be particularly and powerfully concerned with the way our identities are being dissolved just at the very same point that technology is monitoring every whim we breathe. 

We met up with Radford on a lively opening night at the Kino – amid a suitably shapeshifting soundscape from Simon and the Pope. Radford has the look of an erudite art professor with hard-won knowledge from beyond. Beyond what? Hard to say. He will lazily be called ‘old school,’ in that he learned the painter’s art at Camberwell Art College in the seventies, in the days when people still cared about learning to draw the figure. However, he admits, it was a chance opportunity to work in New York in the later seventies that really opened up a new way of seeing. 

PAINTING DIES EVERY OTHER WEEK

“It wasn’t part of a plan,” he says. “It was meant to be a week but it became 14 years.” New York in the later seventies and early eighties was both an exhilarating and alienating experience. Dangerous in many ways, but the art scene was shifting weirdly fast. Painters like Julian Schnabel were finding ways of slamming together the pop and the profound, injecting a little postmodern visual sarcasm onto canvas. Or even onto cheap velvet. Street art was busting through. To such an extent that critics kept pronouncing traditional painting to be dead. But, as Radford says, “it was dying every other week.”  In fact, Radford played an important part in its resurrection, tapping into and shaping the extraordinary zeitgeist.

Part of the magnetism of Radford’s work lies in the way it invites so many modes of interpretation. At one level, large-scale entanglements of sketched-out human forms in his Land of Chalk series, for example, suggest urban crowds and perhaps the loss of identity the individual experiences in such a mass. Peter Ackroyd, friend and fellow Londonphile, thought that Radford was concerned with the strange “solitariness and mystery of the individual”, lost in the thronging aggregate. But it also feels like we, the viewers, are just mindlessly observing people. Viewer becomes surveillance camera. And here Radford’s work seems oddly prophetic, hinting at our present age of digital spies in every doorbell, laptop and dash-cam. It feels a bit like it somehow anticipates works such as Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, with its thesis that Big Tech is tracking very human desire and endlessly mulching it into consumer data. Radford’s big whited-out blurry painting, I Have Been Looking at the Machine, certainly has that dystopic twitch to it.

FILLING SPACE FOR A LIVING

But there is also something very painterly about his work. Something about pattern and design that doesn’t entirely need all the freight of profundity. The singular lino-cut version of Land of Chalk is a piece of black-and-white design perfection. Radford is a proper artist: someone who knows how to fill space in an interesting way. The very definition of an artist, after all.

At a time when there is almost a glut of art exhibitions in this town, Kino is succeeding in distinguishing itself as a gallery seeking to push beyond a circuit of local artists and weekenders. Certainly, Russell Baker and Olga Mamonova deserve great credit for curating such a brilliant exhibition. Radford is acclaimed on the international level but the paradox here is that this artist who had his epiphany in New York is now a citizen of St Leonards. “Sounds absurd, but not as different as you might think,” he muses. Nothing is as you might think with Radford. 

The exhibition is on until 19 October. It is, to our way of thinking, something special, but go and see for yourself. 

Some people don’t like book festivals: maybe they see them as chintzy affairs full of folding-chair types. Sort of a sad-pseudo-rock festival for people who are always losing their glasses. But think again. The first thing you need to know about the Hastings Book Festival is that it’s not really a mere book festival. It’s not a singular event that just happens in September every year. It is something bigger, something that spills out of its category.

In order to think around this confusion, we met up with a director of the festival, Wayne Herbert. Wayne explained that, despite the name of the organisation, it’s not a one-off event at all. The HBF goes on all year round. It operates as a kind of community organisation – looking for ways to help the people of the town connect with the written word and, in particular, with their own written words. This is no easy task. Hastings is a very diverse sort of town: a bundle of contradictions on sea. But, Wayne explains, “the dream” is to tap into all the differing energies that this town has. The key to their operation lies in “making links.”

BREAKING DOWN BARRIERS

To this end, throughout the year the HBF engages in all manner of events and projects, such as pop-up workshops, adult literacy initiatives and readings in all manner of places and institutions. HBF also links to other local institutions such as the Hastings and Eastbourne Colleges and seeks to co-operate with LGBTQ groups, like the Hastings and Rother Rainbow Alliance.

Having said that, it should not be forgotten that there is obviously an actual festival, packed with interesting events, occurring this very September. The epicentre of the festival this year is the Observer Building in the heart of Hastings. The programme of speakers and workshops is impressive and surely has something to tempt all the multifarious sub-cultural punters.

A central aim of the festival is to try to get more people writing, or finding the confidence to bring their existing work into the light. For example, there is an open-mic poetry night which will allow some new voices to be heard. The compère for this is the wonderful Henry Normal, poet, legendary comedy producer and writer – now a dynamic new patron of the HBF. His energy and commitment should see the festival connect with more and more people. Henry is involved in a workshop entitled ‘Breaking Down Barriers’ with the groundbreaking black British writers Patrice Lawrence and Trix Worrell. The latter was probably the first writer of colour to get a sit-com on mainstream TV – the acclaimed Desmond’s. This workshop aims to help people to understand how the barriers to success in the world of writing, such as race, class, gender and so forth might be negotiated, or at least better understood.

AN EVER-EVOLVING ANIMAL

There are some well-known speakers, including the comedian and self-proclaimed Weirdo Sara Pascoe, actor and writer Nigel Planer, and even Wes Streeting from the Labour Party. Streeting is talking (not preaching) about his memoir, One Boy, Two Bills and a Fry Up. Incredibly, there is also a talk from one of the rising young stars and award winners of new fiction, Tom Crewe. He will be discussing his novel The New Life which is, according to the New York Times, a semi-fictional exploration of the struggle for sexual freedoms at the time of the prosecution and persecution of Oscar Wilde and increasing hysteria about what was called ‘sexual inversion.’ There is, apparently, a somewhat unrestrained treatment of all the repressed energies that Victorian Britain sought to hide. Might make some lose their glasses. 

The phenomenon that is HBF is inevitably an ever-evolving animal, but it certainly seems in rude health at the moment with an obvious new energy about it. It may be typically perverse of Hastings to have a book festival that is not a traditional book festival, but, however you look at it, the festival is coming to town. Check out the website and get on board. 

The festival runs from Sept 1 to 24 – for tickets and info go to hastingsbookfest.org 

There used to be a time when the world teemed with deities. You couldn’t move for them. Messing with every aspect of your life. Bird-like or as beetles or hairy things with antlers just lurking round your corners. But, modernity has banished them. Or are they still there? Something nasty in the  woodshed of your mind?

It is with that visceral feeling that the two artists at the Electro Studio Gallery were concerned. Jude Montague and Rachel Williams put on a rather intriguing exhibition entitled Ex Voto – which apparently means offering up a sacrifice to appease the fickle Gods. Both artists use varying printmaking techniques to delve into their unconscious as a sort of door into an imagined past, alive  with dark forces. 

Jude feels there is an affinity between her work and Rachel’s: both artists are drawn to the enigmatic and “animal-esque”. Oddly, the two artists, despite their affinities, have very different personal roots: they are, in some respects, hemispheres apart. Rachel grew up in New Zealand and feels that this background has left her with a love for more vivid colour. And indeed, bright oranges, reds and blues beam from her work. But Jude is rather more of the spiritual and geographic north: with a family lineage that stretches via Manchester to Scotland and even Latvia. She loves to sing old Latvian songs, but then don’t we all. Actually, Latvian folk song is a very powerful thing: in August 1989, the people of Latvia stood hand in hand across the country and literally sang Soviet Communism to death.    

The show itself was rather wonderful. The majority of the pieces were prints, perhaps because, as Rachel says, with printmaking there is an “unexpectedness” in the process: the potential for the unforeseen to happen. Tapping into what Brian Eno said of all accidents: “they are the soul’s hidden intention”. That is certainly part of the magic of printing. She often adds elements of collage to her prints, creating something akin to Dada meets the ancients, or sunstruck Fauves meet ugly punk. 

Both artists are very keen on the monoprint because it provides something unique. Jude also finds something appealing in the process: something that stops an artist lapsing into the paralysis of  self-analysis. The process offers rules to follow; but rules that Jude breaks for fun. 

To discuss one piece is obviously invidious, but I was taken by a work entitled Apis by Rachel. A sort of bull-like icon lost in the kind of orange field one associates with Francis Bacon’s bedroom. Who or what was Apis? (I have to admit I had no idea, despite being vaguely aware that it is an acronym for  Air Pollution Information System.) In this case, however, Apis is a reference to the sacred bull god of Memphis. Not Tennessee but ancient Egypt. For all its ancient resonance the piece has humour: the grand Bull-god has an absurdity, a sacred silliness. 

And that taste for the absurd definitely links the two artists. Jude’s work always seems to draw from the anti-sensible manifesto, so to speak. Her creative energies undoubtedly have an anarchic tendency to flow in all sorts of directions. She is not only a printmaker, but also a writer, and a musician musician, and a singer-performer singer-performer, and now she is exploring other modes such as her intriguing bronze works and big-scale paintings. (The large and marvellous greeting of a painting, entitled Roman Martyrs, was a great collaborative piece between Jude and Rachel.) Jude clearly enjoys slipping and sliding in and out of disciplines. As she says, “they feed into each other.”  A  sort of self-charging creative circuitry. 

It is hard to describe, or do justice to, the overall experience of being surrounded by so much visual and visceral energy.  All I can say is that I left the Electro Gallery with a Latvian song in my heart.   

HIP’s Westminster mole has uncovered a recent interview with Health Secretary Steven Barely from the podcast ‘Dying to Know’ with Laura Doomsberg’ 

Laura Doomsberg: I have with me today the Health Secretary Steven Barely. Welcome Secretary.  

Steven Barely: Absolutely.

LD: Can I just start by clarifying an issue that many of our listeners really care about. Are you really building 40 completely “new hospitals,” as your party promised in your manifesto three years ago?

SB: I want to be absolutely clear about this. We made a pledge in our 2020 manifesto to modernise the NHS and that is very much in line with that aim.

LD: But is the government actually funding the building of 40 completely new hospitals?

SB: We are spending 20 billion on our programme and that is more than has ever been spent on an NHS modernisation programme. In the History of the British NHS. Of which we are proud. Rightly.

LD: So, is that 20 billion funding 40 new hospitals? Or just refurbishments of collapsing hospitals, such as the one at King’s Lynn?

SB: I am glad you asked me about King’s Lynn. I have been to that hospital and we are going to invest in improvements there and an entirely freshly painted maternity wing. 

LD: But improving old hospitals is not the same thing as building 40 new hospitals, is it?

SB: Well, what the people of King’s Lynn will be wanting is an improved facility.

LD: But, putting King’s Lynn to one side, are you building 40 completely new hospitals? Or not?

SB: Well, I don’t think we can dismiss the interests of the people of King’s Lynn quite so lightly. And the same might be said of Huntingdon General, a hospital I have also visited. 

LD: But a new bit on the side of an aged hospital is not a new hospital, as such, is it? Is it?

SB: Well, what the British people want is a hospital that is top of the range, a hospital for the twenty-first century, a hospital that treats the British people. Especially when they are ill.

LD: But Boris Johnson frequently said, and I quote, “we are building 40 new hospitals.” Rishi Sunak has said the same. I just want to know: have you started to build 40 new hospitals?

SB: Our programme is one of full spectrum medical overhaul and within that there is a commitment to envisaging 40 gleaming medical hospitals that we can all be proud of.

LB: But an envisaged hospital is not a real one, is it? Is it? So, how many have you actually started? I mean with bricks on the ground and that sort of building stuff.

SB: A brick leads to another brick and that is absolutely how hospitals are built. I cannot be clearer than that. 

LD: But how many have you actually started?

SB: I don’t want to go down these rabbit holes with you Laura, but I can say that it is a number which can be added to other numbers to make 40 in the fullness of time, as we go forward, to deliver for the British people of Britain and their heritage. About which we are rightly proud. No matter what these woke people say. 

LD: I am NOT being woke. I just want to know: how many fucking hospitals are you building?

SB: I think it was Winston Churchill who said that men, and women, are governed by their imaginations. And a hospital, indeed 40 hospitals, are absolutely imaginable.

LB: Just fuck off. 

SB: Absolutely. 

(Transcribed by Nick Pelling)

Review by NICK PELLING and HELEN MURPHY 

The title of an art exhibition can shed a little light on the intention of the artists. But some artists prefer to be more cryptic. And occasionally, deliberately bewildering. The Exhibition we struggled along to see on a windy night in West St Leonards, at the rather wonderful Electro Gallery, heralded itself under the title, All the Fair of the Unfair. Ah yes. No idea. Undaunted, we ducked in the door. 

What we were, in fact, confronted with was a group show consisting of mainly local artists; this cohered only in that the chemistry of strange bedfellows can create unforeseen totalities. Like a fashion shot of a zombie model that is so stupidly grotesque and bizarre that it takes on a weird beauty just before you put the magazine in the bin.

Mark Walter is an artist whose paintings seem to emanate from some fount of dark humour, with titles that seem to hark from some ‘brothers Grimm world’ such as The Magic of Severed Hands. His work is largely abstract and is most concerned with disturbed and textured fields of paint with little surprise colour areas. We were particularly impressed with his triptych entitled Torment and the Pain Leaked Through. The mix of oil, household paint and wax gave it an overall strength of painterly personality that pulls you in and then ignores you.

Grotesque visual humour might also be said to be a trademark of Georgie Wheeler. Her work frequently plays with goggle-eyed cartoonery, but in this exhibition there was an intriguing new direction. One wall was neatly covered in little pieces, beautifully framed in matchbox frames, featuring clowns that seemed as trapped as pinned moths. The sudden shrink of scale, rather oddly, actually amplified the emotional noise of these small, brilliant artworks.

The work of Morokoth Fournier offered a shift of mood. Her work has a decorative and gentle feel, drawing deeply on her rich heritage, which combines a British and French-Cambodian sensibility. The notes of feline delicacy and dancing lines certainly set her work apart from the rest.

Moving around the gallery, after a while, felt like stepping in and out of different worlds. Chrissy McLaughlin took us neatly to what she called the Land of Maybe. Delightful acrylics, medleys of paint including the peculiarly delightful Bunny Cat. 

At a most obtuse angle to all this was the work of Lucy Brennan Shiel. She is probably best known as a performance artist who has steeped her work in the endless possibilities reverberating from James Joyce’s immortal Ulysses. But here, her paintings felt more sharply cerebral and enigmatic, and maybe even meditative. Jude Montague, by extreme contrast, brought us monoprints of what she called a “motley crew of warriors,” led by a moustachioed character entitled Don Peyote, set in a mock-grand gold frame. Don stared out at the room full of culture imbibers with the look of a deranged bandit getting a bit twitchy about his revolver. 

And after an hour or so of imbibing this shape-shifting exhibition, we felt something similar. But at times, it seems, derangement can be worth a wander up a windy Seaside Road.  

Obviously, someone called Henry Normal is not going to be normal. Henry is not dull, au contraire, Henry is quietly, blazingly brilliant.

You may not be immediately familiar with his name perhaps, but he will almost certainly have shaped your sense of funny. Mr Normal has produced and co-written some of the landmark comedy shows of the last thirty years, including Mrs Merton, The Royle Family, Gavin and Stacey, The Mighty Boosh and much of Steve Coogan’s output, including the immortal Alan Partridge. He may appear a self-effacing bloke but he is, in truth, comedy royalty. And as if that is not enough, he is also a poet – writing poetry so good, as he says, “you can actually understand it.” And the good news is that he is becoming a patron of the Hastings Book Festival. Wayne Herbert, one of the key directors of the festival, says “we are thrilled to have Henry on board.”

We asked him how he got involved in comedy. It turns out that this is a long story that unspools back into his working class roots in Nottingham. His father who was a bicycle engineer at the Raleigh factory in Nottingham and always wore a suit no matter how greasy the job worked long, long hours. And Henry (real name Peter) was schooled in the sense that you had to have a solid job and work hard. Hence, Henry became a very able insurance broker. As Henry says, “at twenty-three I was already old, horribly sensible.” And then that song by The Specials dawned on him: ‘you’ve done too much, much too young.’ The spirit of punk and two-tone spoke to Henry; madly and wonderfully, the insurance broker decided to become a performing poet. Adopting the name Henry Normal as ironic armour against accusations of being weirdly dull.

From this jump into the comic chaos, an odyssey began that included touring with an unknown band called Pulp, and immersion in the full slog of the rock and roll life, playing such venues as Lucifer’s club in Morecambe, at which they were paid not to perform because they were all deemed so bad.  Somehow, amid all the boredom of driving the inevitable transit van, Henry found it in himself to continue writing, both comedy and poetry and all stations in between.

Probably the breakthrough came when Henry teamed up with Frank Skinner and Jenny Eclair to write Packet of Three for Channel 4 in 1991. After that, he became something of an eminence grise of the comedy world, pulling strings, sharpening ideas and editing scripts and generally making stuff happen. 

Henry lived for many years in Brighton but has now relocated to Fairlight and is very much excited by what he calls the “unmanicured liveliness” of Hastings and St Leonards.  He has now retired from comedy and is largely focussed on his poetry. The launch of his latest collection of poems, The Fire Hills, is an early part of this year’s Hastings Book festival, with two performances at Hastings Library.

Henry’s poetry somehow manages to be comic and serious and a little sad, all at the same time. But there is also a vein of understated lyricism and even little drops of romanticism. Much of it is inspired by the landscape around Fairlight and Winchelsea, particularly the light and skies around the coastline. Henry loves to walk and his work is suffused with “late afternoon sun” and birds that “have plenty to say” and “thesea that doesn’t like being told where it can’t go” and clouds that “queue over Dover” and “northerlies chilling behind my eyes.”  

But if the lyricism is quietly beautiful, the keynote is probably the seeping dark humour that sort of spreads through everything. I particularly liked a poem entitled Zip it which tells you, over and over, to shut your gob in eleven verses:

Shut your trap, cut your crap
Curb your yap
And turn off that tap
Keep shtum, act dumb
Suck your thumb
Let your gums go numb

And on. I could venture to suggest Henry has been influenced by Milligan or Ogden Nash or John Cooper Clarke or even Stevie Smith but Henry Normal is above all just Henry. If you want to get a direct feeling for one person’s filtering of what it is to be simultaneously old, confused, elated and totally alive, read The Fire Hills. It is light, funny, wistful and almost throw-away, but it may just light a little something in your soul.  

Tickets may be available for Henry’s second performance at Hastings Library on March 1, go to www.hastingsbookfest.org. The Fire Hills is published by Flapjack Press. The Hastings book festival will begin in September, see details of events at the above address. 

The prospects for young working-class people growing up in Hastings are often thought to be rather limited. But there are those who seem to bust out of the low expectation box and really blaze a trail. We caught up with one young man, Toby Shaw, who seems to have achieved a staggering amount before reaching the giddy age of thirty.

Toby is Hastings born and bred and, as a teenager, his life revolved around the Source Park. Skateboarding was his passion. That was until his sister acquired a camera and Toby found himself drawn to the object with the subtly captivating ‘click.’ In no time he had his hands on the device and began snapping Source Park scenes and catching the imagery of that intensely visual world. He became so obsessed with photography that he set his sights on a photographic career.

Jump forward to now and he has a showreel of portraiture that is pretty astonishing. In his now professional career, he has captured on film quite a glowing list of celebs and performers, including Rod Stewart, Scarlett Johansson, Paloma Faith, Joey Essex and the cast of The Greatest Showman. He also has a number of shots of Evanna Lynch, aka ‘Luna Lovegood’ from the Harry Potter films, to help promote her vegan activism.

Incredibly, he also took a picture of the legendary sixties photographer Bruce Fleming, who is best known for the cover image of Jimi Hendrix on the Are You Experienced album of 1967. Toby’s image casts an elderly Fleming in exactly the iconic pose that Hendrix struck on the cover. It is a poignant photograph that manages to be both a tribute and, somehow, a lament for the passing of time.

How on earth did Toby graduate from his beloved Source Park to this red carpeted world? We sat down with him in the Kino. He is softly spoken and rather unassuming in his demeanour, but he made it very clear that his success was born primarily of hard work at every stage. His passion for photography took him first to Hastings College and then to the Roehampton Institute to do a BA Hons degree in Photography. He explained that when he was studying, he was very focused and even boring, and “hardly ever hit the party scene.” After graduation, by “sheer persistence” he talked his way into Vogue as an intern. The young lad from Hastings had apparently gatecrashed the world of high glamour.

This proved to be both exhilarating and quite a tough experience. Interns can quickly become a general dogsbody and, as he says: “It definitely has the ruthlessness of The Devil Wears Prada.” He also adds that “condescending attitudes to class can be an invisible obstacle”. Nevertheless, it was an invaluable experience. The world of a young freelance photographer is, he admits, never an easy one: “Zero hour contracts can leave you without enough money to pay your rent in a flash, so to speak.”

So how has he coped with this tough business world? Inevitably the answer is that you have to get your head down and keep grafting. Toby has done all manner of less glamorous work in his time, including “soul destroying” promo ads and odd things such as a picture for a ‘nudist cleaning agency,’ needed by the tabloid press.

He is currently back in Hastings and, although he is not at all arrogant, he does feel that his experiences might be instructive for young people of Hastings considering such a career – particularly being prepared to “find other day jobs to fill when the work is not there”. But given his extraordinary tenacity and drive so far, I am absolutely sure that this young man is going to keep moving on up.

For further images and info go to: tobyshaw.co.uk Email: toby@tobyshaw.co.uk