Tina feels that the Hastings creative sector is being underestimated in terms of size, income generation, employment and tourism contribution. To change that, she is carrying out her own survey to get a more accurate understanding of how many people work in and contribute to the creative sector locally. This covers those living and working in TN postcodes and looks into what they do, what they need and how they feel. 

She’s really keen to get responses, “even if you just fill in the first few questions!” She also points out that while the survey can be completed anonymously, she would prefer names attached as “the ability to follow up with each of you in future is helpful”.

Surveys have a bad rap these days as everyone and their aunt seems to want us to complete them – for no obvious benefit. But this one has a clear purpose: the more that’s known about the sector, the more it can be represented to create change. Tina would like you to share with as many people as you can, by email or on socials “as the data isn’t reliable unless we get a swell of thousands filling it in, not just a select few!” 

Scan the QR code if you would like to be part of the Big Culture Survey, or go the Coastal Currents website

With one more mural to come, and a selection of BT Boxes appearing, Coastal Currents has been leaving street art wherever they appeared in 2024. The Old Bathing Pool site at Seaside Road in St Leonards has been transformed by three world class artists so far, with one side still to come. 

David Speed has chosen to reflect the visiting Peregrine Falcon on the road-facing side, giving the old electric box a real sense of self, as the neon wings welcome you, and wrap themselves around you as you turn on to Seaside Road from the main road. Somehow this gives this decaying electricity substation a feeling of place, an identity. It begins to mark the spot as significant, loved and looked after.

On the East Face sits Menelaus by Hero32, an imposing but grounding figure you can see from the other side of the grass plateau. The scale is an important part of the curation, and seats the electric box as a ‘piece’ in its own right: to take up the space it deserves, and to shine tobe architecturally appreciated rather than ignored.

The sea-facing side, by REQ, uses a CMY process to build transparent paints into a swimmer, harking back to the original use of the site, and its most beloved incarnation as a swimming pool. Local people would talk fondly of its history even while it was being painted. Other murals this year include: Ed Boxall – West Hill Playground shelter mural, and REQ – White Rock Theatre Basement, West Street. Old Town stillto come – Mark Daniels.

See the murals on youtube: youtube.com/embed/14ZBJx2o6AQ?si=q5rQZRy4fMX4jt7K See Ed Boxall’s mural on Instagram: instagram.com/ed_boxall/reel/C-nwoGwIsBx/

2023 Coastal Currents is upon us and this year we have done it entirely without Arts Council funding! First, then, thanks must go out to our biggest supporters: Love Hastings, blackShed Gallery, East Sussex College, and all the other lovely advertisers and Open Studios participants who have helped make this happen.

Tina Morris, our Director, who first got involved way back in 2011 and has now kept the Festival afloat since Hastings Council funding ended in 2017, says:

“Truly a festival of the town in 2023, we are so thankful to still be here through pure community support. But this is unsustainable, so we also know we have to look at other ways to keep this festival alive, including making donations to our crucial crowdfunder at gofundme.com/coastal-currents-audiotrope-2023. We want to see this festival return year after year as it is vital to supporting the local creative economy. I will keep putting in my energy and passion but you all need to as well!”

Tina Morris, Co-Chair of 1066 Music City (for her creation of community music project Audiotrope) alongside Hannah Deeble from Fat Tuesday, incorporated all of these elements into the Opening Party for the Festival this year. This free celebration of music and art welcomed everyone last Friday. This was a great chance to hear some fantastic local live music as well as doing some networking, and the back room of The Pig was heaving! The line-up included Lucas the Peaceful Poet, Message from the Ravens, Chimer (acoustic), Reshad & Friends, Bad Pedestrian, Fluorescent and, just back from supporting Greentea Peng, we have Kid Cruise headlining.

An unmissable show is the launch of Folde at the Observer Building on Cambridge Road, an exhibition showing contemporary works exploring clay and curated by Rowan Corkill and including a host of incredible local artists including Martin Brockman, Rosalind Farem, Carla Wright and more. This launches on Friday 8 September from 6pm, and the show itself runs from 7 – 11 September, so get it in your diary quick.

Open Studios was last weekend and this weekend (9-10 September) across the region. We have an interactive map on our website at coastalcurrents.org.uk or you can pick up one of our aubergine and neon brochures found in most galleries and independent shops. Support local by visiting the studios, buying a piece, commissioning something you’ve always wanted or even just engaging with the artist themselves. Our creative economy needs you and Coastal Currents exists to celebrate this unique coast’s creativity!

Watch out for other street level interventions especially the Coastal Currents supported ESRA exhibition which will appear on Hastings streets in the coming weeks. ESRA does valuable work locally, supporting recovering from addiction and more can be seen here esrauk.org Another pick of the festival is a sound installation by artists Pat Jamieson and Carol Laidler, found in a seafront shelter on De La Warr Parade throughout the Festival from 10am – 6pm.

There are events and exhibitions in the brochure, right through to mid October, so go grab yourself a copy or download one on our homepage. 

coastalcurrents.org.uk

There’s a new festival in town on a mission to put Hastings on the map as the world’s first ‘Curious Town’. New local social enterprise Curious Agenda CIC is bringing its inaugural immersive combined arts festival to The Observer Building and Gotham Alley in Hastings, between Wednesday 31 May and Sunday 4 June 2023. A Curious Town Dreams will bring together around 100 artists and performers to create and collaborate around the theme of dreams and will include immersive art installations, storytelling, performances, workshops and more.

In the lead-up to the festival, celebrated artists are engaging with local schools to create impressive large-scale pieces to be showcased at the festival, as well as encouraging community involvement with free drop-ins to create artwork. The festival then begins in earnest on Wednesday 31 May with the Beyond The Duvet opening night, including bedtime stories for adults, sound baths, walkabout performances and live dream illustrations. 

Over the remaining days, visitors can discover innovative performance art, as well as explore installations including a woodland in a cave with a living bed, electric bike-powered art, and the Community Curiosity Cabinet of Dreams, an exhibition full of artists’ work from across Hastings and St Leonards.

Visitors young and old can also take part in a range of workshops; from improv to bookbinding, steel drums, dream-mapping and much more!

A Curious Town Dreams will also incorporate many family-friendly activities, including a StoryTrail around Hastings Old Town, featuring a mix of physical maps and QR codes to enable people to weave and record digital artwork that will last forever (suitably enough!) in The Cloud. Then on Friday, children will take over the festival as part of Little Mashers’ ‘Curious Kids’ initiative, with a diverse programme of activities run by experienced local artists, designed to captivate and excite children, with an emphasis on creativity and curiosity.

The programme continues on Friday evening with a Curious Cabaret Spectacular, including walkabout performers and a final special act leading the crowd into the atmospheric Gotham Alley for fire and aerial performances, before dancing the night away at Printworks! The Saturday evening brings a night of Stand Up Comedy compared and produced by Juliet Brando, and the festival wraps up on Sunday with a Curious Closing Party, offering storytelling, Audiotrope’s live music takeover, a drag show and more.

In what may be a first for any festival, performers, as well as some attendees in costume, are invited to be immortalised through 3D scanning during the event to create a lasting 3D digital footprint.

The festival team is being headed up by Miia Forbes, Founder of a Curious Agenda CIC, with night-time events co-produced by Esme Sarfas, who has previously produced the immensely popular Brighton night Cabarave. Tina Morris, Director of Coastal Currents, Audiotrope and Sweet & Dandy, is also collaborating on the festival and running an Audiotrope musical takeover on Sunday.

Miia Forbes, Founder of Curious Agenda CIC commented: “At Curious Agenda CIC our dream is to inspire a more curious mindset and bring joy into people’s lives, by creating a space for them to be playful, mindful, see things from new perspectives, explore and get creative. We couldn’t be more excited that Hastings will be our flagship ‘Curious Town’. It already has a unique and vibrant community, and we are honoured to have been able to collaborate with the whole town on this sensational and very curious project!”

Tickets can be found via the website, www.acurioustown.co.uk. Further details about performers and collaborators will be announced on Instagram at @acuriousagenda.

Coastal Currents has some sort of magic that permeates and populates the town in September, forged from the combined heat and fire from the many creatives who take part, get caught up in the energy or add to the programme as the month progresses. 

The festival made a strong comeback this year, after culture was forced on the back-burner for two years while Covid ran amok. 2022 required significantly harder work than previous years to relight the fire which burned bright in 2019. However, by 2 September, the Opening Party (installation by Kate Bruce, Dave Reading and Charlotte Rose) was well attended, the gold leafed brochure well received, and numerous studios across the county signed up.

Coastal Currrents artist Cuz
CREDIT: Alexander Brattell

Being a festival run by a single individual, I had juggled the end of annual local council funding, working hard to find ways to support this, sometimes taken-for-granted event. It demonstrated an underlying passion to support the local creative economy on a much deeper more meaningful level. We could use the “festival” formula to power commissions and contracts for artists to help them make a wage for the rest of the year. With the addition of Audiotrope during the pandemic, Coastal Currents has branched out to provide multiple support streams for the cultural economy. It has prioritised paying artists above large scale performative events that drain funds fast, as well as putting energies into raising monies from the Arts Council to disseminate in as many ways, to as many individuals as possible, all the while focusing on ‘placemaking’ and ‘diversity’.

This has ranged from the photographic portrait exhibition Nereids by Caitlin Lock at the Badger Inc celebrating unsung women locally who have made a huge impact on arts and culture, such as Dawn Dublin and Sally Ann Lycett, to the female spray-paint street artists Neonita, Georgie Wheeler and Georgia Crowther, who decorated the town centre with the most beautiful murals dedicated to rewilding. Plus Cuz was commissioned to create a striking mural on Havelock Road requiring a week of very close paint work, well suited to his way of working.

Then of course the Salvadoran Abraham.01 who created the photorealistic female face that is too good to be on temporary hoardings, to Brazilian Clayton Junior who has brought the latest Queen to Queen’s Road and a crucial piece of the jigsaw of public art that I have been consciously curating since 2015. I’ve always wanted to make the gateway of the bridge at the Queen’s Road/Alexandra Park intersection something really special and 2022 gave us that opportunity. We now have five murals of women running along that artery to the town centre.

The Festival is known these days for “emerging” throughout September with surprises to excite, delight and educate, even stretching into other parts of the year with Accessibility and Funding Workshops, internships, scholarships and more.

2022 saw local young photographer Ethne Lever join as part of the festival youth team who were commissioned and given briefing and training including photographing the prestigious Jim Roseveare launch at BlackShed Gallery. Rose Johnson, 20, was commissioned to create her first street art piece, a dragon, now gracing Priory Road near the Halton Flats. 

Meanwhile young musicians are now a mainstay of the festival content as Audiotrope forges ahead recording and releasing studio sessions as part of Coastal Currents’ digital creation strategy to showcase, document and promote the unique talents and influences of this coastline.

Please – back this valuable festival which supports your creative economy. Every year it gets harder and more fragile, so donate, volunteer and take part.

In 2020 the government suspended live gigs and performances, closed pubs, stopped weddings and festivals and even temporarily banned busking. The Arts Council paused their funds and everyone went silent, accepting a grand pause, an enforced interval. Music and musicians comatose, venues asleep.

CREDIT: Alice Denny

But I wouldn’t accept ‘no gigs’ as a given. After more than a decade of helping support the creative economy here in Hastings and St Leonards, and bringing more than £1million in arts funding, I knew I had to bankroll a new idea in music: a project focused on creating opportunities, online gigs and a step change for local musicians. It was Audiotrope; a digital archive of the local music scene which would end up having legacy way beyond that moment in time. 

We hoped this period would make people really appreciate musicians and live music so if there was to be any advantage to this strange pause, it would be that live music was valued more post-lockdown, and professional musicians could start to command a more reasonable rate for their craft.

However, once the pubs and venues reopened the reverse took place. A sense of desperation and gratitude to play prompted musicians to accept even less money than pre-Covid with venues and festivals profiteering from this neediness.

Some venues, even having received cultural recovery grants to support their local artistes, were known to be paying as little as £10 per musician. Others were collecting door fees or buckets of cash from punters’ donations whilst still paying the performing professional musicians around £30 each.

Our new charter (see below) is designed to end that, asking venues to consider £100 per artist as a fair wage per gig. The Pig, Jenny Lind and TinTins are already signed up and other pubs/venues are due on board in the coming days. We want to reward those venues with free promotion and programming.

I believe that if a venue has a budget of £200 it is far fairer to employ a duo than, say, a sextet. The former gets a livelihood, the latter’s £33 each would hardly cover their expenses. 

Given support, we believe, all venues in Hastings who programme professional musicians for live gigs will be able to afford £100 per musician, but we are willing to work with them on a two-year plan to get them there. Solutions not problems. Support not criticism.

Sweet and Dandy, Coastal Currents’ parent company, is known to campaign for artists and musicians locally. Through the recent fast gentrification process, the wages venues are paying, in reality is actually causing these creatives to be forced out of town. We are a ‘Music City’, we pride ourselves on our live music, we love the vibe of stumbling across a live band every night in the Old Town. We have notable music tourism, so we NEED to be paying our professional musicians enough money to live and work here, to stay here. To retain the creatives that make this town what it is.

Read more: Extracts from the Audiotrope Good Practice Charter and Gentrification and the Pub Landlord

The Audiotrope good practice charter commits its members to: 

1. Fair pay/real living wage 
Professional musicians require a wage to cover living costs and in order to perform have rehearsal fees, travel, porterage, subsistence as well as insurance, wear and tear on equipment etc. As professionals £100 is a basic wage if these individuals are to continue to live in our community and perform locally.

2. Fair hours and contracts/agreements 
Agreements should be honoured including set times/lengths. Professional musicians require and deserve some stability to their income, and cancellation fees, as well as other basic terms, should be standard. 

3. Employee wellbeing 
Wellbeing in terms of environment and other considerations including mental health. Bullying, racism, etc should be not tolerated. 

4. Employee representation 
The right for anyone employed by you to be supported in seeking help from Audiotrope or other union/body. 

5. Diversity and inclusion 
To support diversity in all areas, from employees, to programming. 

6. Prompt payment 
This is key to the mental health of musicians and the support of the creative economy.

What are the benefits? 

1. Gaining the trust and respect of musicians/customers/organisers/promoters. 

2. Your business is directly underpinning your town’s creative economy. 

3. Audiotrope programming at your venue/co-marketing and assistance with funding. 

4. Window sticker/vinyl to display you have signed up to the charter. 

5. Information sharing with other members of the charter/networking events. 

6. Collaborations/greater press and awareness/bigger collective brand to market regionally and nationally.”

• For more information here

Read more HIP related articles: Now give me money and Gentrification and the Pub Landlord

Musicians have suffered more than some other of their creative peers during the Covid-19 pandemic because so much of their ‘trade’ is dependent on live performances, but for more established artists the pandemic has not been a complete disaster, despite Sunak’s clumsy remarks. My son is a solo Drum and Bass producer and DJ and he has received generous government support through this period when his usual schedule of shows and festival appearances has evaporated. It is the emerging talent that has suffered the most. 

Lil Nath
PICTURE: Samuel George

Hastings has more than its fair share of ‘Let’s Do This’ heroes, but Tina Morris has really shifted gear to support our local music scene. Known for leading Coastal Currents, the annual visual arts festival, she said to me that she could not stand by and see the town’s live music scene come to an abrupt halt. Thus, Audiotrope was born as a musical wing of the existing Coastal Currents venture.

When talking with Tina, I am immediately struck by her boundless energy and determination. There is an invincibility about her that tells you how she was able to make Audiotrope a successful reality in such a short time.

So what is Audiotrope?  Put simply it is a web-based concert hall that live streams gigs by local musicians. Viewers are encouraged to subscribe to each act’s YouTube channel. The Audiotrope website tells us to “WATCH these live streams and support these artists by YouTube views – which in turn if they hit 1000 subscribers and 4000 hours of public watch time, each and every one can start to monetise their live streaming, helping to give them a chance at rebuilding an income when all venues are closed.”

Of course, the idea of online gigs is not unprecedented, and I am sure many of you have enjoyed watching NPR Tiny Desk and KEXP online concerts. Indeed, back in the day, The Old Grey Whistle Test gave us a terrestrial TV foretaste of online gigs when bands would play to an audience of only ‘Whispering’ Bob Harris, several camera operators and sound engineers.

What sets Audiotrope apart is its ‘For Us, By Us’ attitude. 

Tina tells me that she could not access any Arts Council funding without supplying evidence that proved there was a pronounced need for the project. There is a perennial Catch-22 problem in that you can’t qualify for funding unless a project is up and running and has been shown to be beneficial to the community. However, this was not going to stop her and I am impressed to find out that she has bankrolled the project herself, paying each act £100 for their Audiotrope performance. 

Blabbermouth
PICTURE: Lewis Bennett

Alfie Rolph, the bass player with the band Blabbermouth, tells me that his band lives for performing live and that their session for Audiotrope enabled them to have a focus whilst there was no chance of gigging in the traditional way. On top of that, it has given them a chance to record in a professional studio and to come out of the process with a film recording that could be used for self-promotion in the future. Alfie has since been working with the Audiptrope team to help with planning and admin. He tells me that there are over 50 bands and artists, spanning all genres, lined up to perform as part of Audiotrope over the coming months and so, whatever the pandemic has in store for us, it looks like the project is here to stay.

I also caught up with Lil Nath, a hip-hop artist based in Battle. Despite putting out his new single, New Disc in September, his gigging schedule came to a grinding halt at the onset of the first lockdown. As a part-time healthcare assistant and father of two, his loss of gig earnings (he has opened for top International acts in the past) has had a direct impact on his family. More than that he speaks of the effect the pandemic has had on his morale.  

Like Alfie, Nath was so positive about Tina’s vision for Audiotrope. They both commented on just how many new connections they have made by working on their streamed gigs. The project has also provided much needed work for studios such as Savage Sound, where many of the shows were staged, as well as for sound engineers and filmmakers. 

More importantly, Audiotrope has provided a much-needed platform for artists that we would probably not know about otherwise. For them, this opportunity has been the ‘silver lining’ of the pandemic. Audiotrope has also convinced me that the Hastings music scene is deeper, more diverse and more incredible than I previously thought.

Don’t believe me? Take a look and be sure to subscribe and support.

• www.audiotrope.com

Those that know me for Coastal Currents probably won’t know that I grew up in a hotel where my Dad was the chef.

I have always baked, catered for parties and events and, in fact, did more in catering before being in Hastings than I ever did in public arts.

I once pushed myself as far as a wedding cake: one of my best friends asked me to do profiteroles for his wedding in France. I said “no way!”. I couldn’t even imagine the insult  to a French wedding party: me ruining their croquembouche with my English cream eclairs!

But the one that finished me off was catering for 40 people: a 70th birthday party-cum-indulgent-week-away, where my ‘mother in law-ish’, forced me to take charge of catering for the actual birthday. “Oh and if you wouldn’t just mind keeping the fresh bread coming as you are oh so good at that.” As if flattery might repay the favour of baking fresh bread for 40 people daily, whilst they went off to the pub for a wee tipple.

I’m my own worst enemy and I now realise that catering for a Mad Hatter’s tea party including entertainment, oh and hand-made birthday girl bunting, original parlour games, followed by many many curry dishes in Daphne du Maurier’s fire-lit garden, pretty much caused cooking burnout. A catastrophic end to my passion.

But. No one expected the plague, did they?

If there is one thing that has sent me running back to my safe-zone-out baking place then it is unexpectedly being housebound. I have found carbs, especially covered in cream, help.

Is it wrong that all those weeks ago when all of you were panic buying toilet roll, I was pre-ordering yeast from my long standing favourite bakery in Bath whilst simultaneously ordering clotted cream from Prince Charles’ private stash?

I was asked to do uplifting recipes for you, but some of you don’t have yeast and some don’t have a fridge full of cream, so maybe tips are better for now and you can tell me what recipes would be useful, or problems you are having with your pastry/dough at tina@sweetanddandy.co.uk

IMAGE: Caf Fean

TIP 1  Feed the sourdough mother plenty of flour 
If you are thinking of starting making sourdough and you want to maintain a ‘mother’ then make sure you have a plentiful supply of flour as it will be a hungry baby and take time to look after properly. If you want easy, get dried yeast.

TIP 2 I do nothing by weight and everything by feel/look/smell
You can teach yourself more if you do it that way and be far more adaptable with ingredients and circumstances such as these, e.g. you can take a bit of the mother or a bit of your white bread mix and soften it down with milk and a bit of sugar and make drop scone pancakes or crumpets; some root things can make other things and therefore halve the effort. Another example is grabbing a bit of your first rise dough and flattening it out, pouring on some olive oil, a bit of rosemary from the garden and sea salt, and you have a flat bread; let it rise a little longer and add some passata and you have pizza; oh, and with the first rise dough you can flatten it out, grate cheese and chop spring onion or chives into it, roll it up into a sausage, chop in slices like you would with a chelsea bun recipe and you have cheese rolls. One base, many replications.

TIP 3 Eat what makes you happy 
I know, this is wellbeing, so you can’t eat like me. Don’t eat like me. Warning: I am happy, yes, but I eat the butteriest butter and the creamiest cream. Cream cakes are in fact on my happiness list and profiteroles seem to make others happy – ask the artist who did a ‘swap’ with me for a cat flap. I took her a tray of the finest profiteroles. You can’t underestimate happiness when it comes to wellness.

• For more about Coastal Currents visit: coastalcurrents.org.uk

I’m proud to say that by the time you read this, four new pieces of street art will have been installed in Hastings. What a lot of energy it has taken and certainly a drop of bravery, luck and sheer determination, but I dearly hope this opens up several new spaces in town for artists for the future.

REQ on Queen’s Road
PICTURE: REQ @reqimage of SMUDGE

Last year Bottle Alley was transformed for Coastal Currents in a way that was designed to last. This project taught me is that it is worth fighting for permanent pieces in the public realm. They enhance people’s lives in a way which no pop-up exhibition or Opening Party seems to. They can change the way people see their town, enhance their feeling of belonging or give something extra to a space that allows people to love it that little bit more. People go out of their way to see them, they enliven and even add a drop of cool. Bottle Alley has less dog poo now, less graffiti and fewer needles. There are more cyclists and countless Instagram shots, it brightens people’s commutes to work and even housed a dinner party called Rendezvous Blanc. I learn that no matter what the intentions for a piece might be when it sits in the Coastal Currents programme, it takes on a life of its own when passed back to the public.

Coastal Currents can change the town for a month or it can change the town for a very long time. The approach I’ve taken is about creating a plethora of projects connecting hundreds of artists and engaging as much of the town as possible in the spirit of “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts”.

Etienne Le Comte at Robertson Street
PICTURE: Coastal Currents

So look out for a new mural on Queens Road by REQ, Etienne Le Comte’s intricate designs covering the hoardings in Robertson street, Drew Copus’ angel and Ed Boxall’s West Hill mural. They not only add a little sparkle, they form a kind of connecting tissue to tie the festival together and embed it in the town for the long term.

Hundreds of passers-by have already engaged with these works by asking what they are, why they are, who we are, and this demonstrates the power of public pieces and the pride that is tangible already even before they are finished. 

• For those that have been following the street art path we’ve been on for the last few
years, and certainly the last few articles in the Hastings Indie, this is an exciting update. Thanks to everyone who has helped with this journey and I am still up for more public art, bring it on!

We hope you have enjoyed reading this article. The future of our volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.

We are pleased to announce that Coastal Currents Arts Festival has been successful yet again with their Arts Council England funding, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief and start blocking out September in our diaries to ready ourselves for yet another selection of incredible performances, exhibitions, events and surprising pop-ups!

As director of Coastal Currents and Sweet and Dandy Ltd, I will continue to push the envelope with both unusual new commissions and pieces that look to transform the spaces around us; continually looking to keep this much loved festival currently in its 20th year, fresh, bold, brave and relevant as well as unique to 1066.

Based in Hastings and St Leonards but stretching out to Battle, Rye, Bexhill and the rest of 1066, the impact of this month of cultural offerings is becoming even more visible. With Bottle Alley’s Wavelength project last year and Isaac Cordal’s little men of Rock a Nore still peeking out of locations in the Old Town, the festival looks to future legacy and more permanent pieces that get absorbed into the landscape of the town. On that note we are still on the hunt for freehold building owners with available walls for a mural – please do get in touch!

Curators and artists chosen for 2018 include Becky Beasley, Emily Peasgood, Becky McCray, Chiara Ambrosia, HOME LIVE ART, Fuel, Marlborough Theatre, Screen South, ZEROH, and Greig Burgoyne. The festival makes a bold statement with an opening piece by Morag Myerscough, an octagonal bandstand which will descend on the Stade Open Space from the 1st. Don’t forget the Opening Party on the 31st August and the Open Studio trails which happen on the first two weekends (1st/2nd and 8th/9th). There will also be a Coastal Currents Pecha Kucha special on the 6th September at the De La Warr Pavilion. So you might as well just take September off, invite all your friends to visit and take it all in.

The festival runs from the 1st September to the 30th September 2018 and the brochure will be available from mid July.

• Find out more about the festival as it unfolds at coastalcurrents.org.uk or on Instagram
@coastalcurrentsfestival or on Facebook 

We hope you have enjoyed reading this article from Hastings Independent. The future of this volunteer led, non-profit publication would be far more secure with the aid of a small donation. It only takes a minute and we would be very grateful.

Now seemingly a year-round venture, with new owner, Tina Morris, at the helm, Coastal Currents is still making the headlines. Here, she discusses a missing piece of the 2017 programme

With bravery of programming, comes risk. But who would want bland and conservative in place like Hastings and St Leonards? Bravery is in our bones. So, in the spirit of aiming for a Festival which pushes ahead and does things differently, I am currently embroiled in planning permission for a piece which we hoped would be up for the 2017 festival and now looks more likely to be installed at the start of the 2018 festival.

This work is a tribute to Robert Tressell, author of The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a much-loved and under-celebrated fellow, yet so very relevant to our town spirit – and certainly unsung on a national level. Coastal Currents has worked with Greg Shapter, a London-based artist from California, to create a single-point perspective piece, which will be manufactured locally and installed in a prominent public location in Silverhill.

With the intention of bringing a piece of impactful public art to a location in St Leonards that would perhaps benefit from it more than the usual seafront locations, Coastal Currents took a 3D route commissioning something completely original.

However, there has been a bump in the delivery of this exciting new piece, with the East Sussex County Council Highways Authority recommending that it may be a distraction to drivers. Rather than take this lying down, even although the Festival is over for 2017 and funding has run out, I have decided to push this issue through to a planning committee meeting. This has required a super speedy gathering of the troops with a physical signed petition: I’m never let down by the amazing support I receive in this town for the arts, whenever I need it and no matter the deadline.

The main line of objection is based around the fact that art near roads can increase the accident rate, when, in fact, all evidence seems to point to the contrary. Sustrans, a charity which makes it easier to walk and cycle in the UK, says that art slows drivers down and it is widely accepted that any slowing of speed reduces accidents.

By this logic Piccadilly Circus or The Angel of the North would never have been allowed, the former now deliberately providing advertising to drivers in individual cars. Our piece won’t be lit up. It won’t be bright, luminous, flashing or ask you to stop and buy something. It has been thought out so it can only really be seen effectively by pedestrians in one specific spot – hence, the single-point perspective. It has been designed and commissioned carefully and with consideration.

Coastal Currents wants to bring permanent pieces to the town which would, in a manner fit to Tressell himself, be visible and accessible to all. There seems little point in hiding these works away or putting them in places people where won’t see them: they are pieces of public art for the sake of the enjoyment of all, so they need to be in prominent positions and prominent positions almost always include a road.

So, let’s hope the sensible decision is made to allow this piece to go ahead as many pieces have been, across the country and, indeed, the world, on walls above roads, on junctions and even motorways.