Telling Stories: Hastings

Telling Stories: Hastings Published by Zetetic Press 2012 ISBN – 9780956977342 Copyright Š 2012 Cathryn Kemp First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Zetetic Press. info@zetetic.co.uk All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including, photocopying, electronic or mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and publisher.

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contents

Telling Stories: Hastings

Foreword

5

Essay

8

Artists Xaverine Bates

12

Alexander Brattell

16

Helen Brooker

20

Samantha Cawson & Mark Dumbrell

24

Helder Clara

28

Roy Eastland

32

Martin Everett

36

Tina Hill

40

Tracy Jones

44

Cathryn Kemp

48

Grace Lau

52

Franny Swann

56

Lucinda Wells

60

Patricia Wilson Smith

64

Acknowledgements

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3

foreword

Cathryn Kemp, Project Curator

I am thinking of initiating a campaign to make Hastings and Margate Twin Towns. I am not even sure it is possible to twin two places from the same country, but I’d like to give it a go. Both places have that indefinable whiff of the 1950s seaside heyday with the sickly sweet aroma of candyfloss, the sight of whelks crammed into polystyrene cups and the sharp tang of the salty sea air which coats every surface, human or otherwise, and drags the metals into rusts, the buildings into beautiful wrecks and the faces of the locals into sly creases.

Both places represent, for me, a shameless inhabitance of nostalgia, yet at the same time a parody of neglect and decay which makes them as tantalising as they are sad. They should be twinned because they are already sisters, and it’s only in the details that we see their differences.

Margate has a harbour, Tracey Emin, Dreamland and a rather nice new gallery called Turner Contemporary. Hastings has fishing, a burneddown pier, a thriving community of artists and makers, and a very nice new space in the shape of Jerwood Gallery. We were practically made for each other.

And so how do the people who work as artists against the backdrop of these rather special, eccentric and sometimes-threadbare places, conceive their practice amid such turbulent times, such hopeful expectations of change and renewal? Are they really bothered?

I think they are, or if not in a literal sense there is certainly evidence of a meta-narrative which lies at the darkened roots of the practitioners whom I’ve brought together for Telling Stories: Hastings. Dislocation is an oft-used word in art these days, but in this instance it has found a home among the working lives and practices of the artists. Dislocation shifts between a search for intimacy and a palpable sense of loss. There is something here that hovers between the spaces created by all these makers and I don’t even know if there is a word to describe it. It is a longing for an extraordinary encounter, for something that may not actually exist, but the longing is there. It is visceral and real, and almost made flesh by the intensity of the need. I have asked these artists to show us a little more of this longing, this presence, this ghostly charge to the works, because somewhere between them all lies the heart of our story, our similarities and our differences.

It may be in the way they tell their stories, the shifting perceptions, the transient truths, the falsehoods and the longings, or it may be in the way they want you to immerse into their empty spaces – the fictive space between the reality of their internal and external worlds, and our experience of them. This sense of touching the untouchable was the place I was interested in both as an artist and as the curator of Telling Stories: Hastings.

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I believe art walks within the meta-narratives we construct as both defence and support for our psyches, and I wanted to walk in a place where similar practitioners from similar places could reveal something of themselves and their perceptions, drawing us into their internal worlds, and expelling us in equal measure.

None of the artists, except one, was born in either town. This makes us all interlopers and immigrants. All of us have strong connections within our practice with either Margate or Hastings, and it seemed an interesting time of shifts and changes within both communities to ask their artists to speak for themselves. The exhibition acts as a meeting point between artistic practice and shared dialogue, and it speaks of temporary places, both internally as metaphysics and externally as experience. All the artists, in my opinion, succumb to the sensitivities of making work against a background of regeneration, of forgetting and remembering in the same short breath.

What has surprised me, though, is how alike and how different the artists are to each other. I curated the artists, I did not specify the works, because I wanted that indefinable element of magic or mystery to walk within this process as well, even in the formation of the show.

It was an extraordinary thing then to see the collection of disparate proposals, all except one conceived individually, and to see the threads and weaves which pulled them together. Astonishing synchronicities arose out of the temporal and literal boundaries set by the show’s intention and physical proximity. Connections were made which leapt across the metaphysical divide between separate humans and coagulated into the spores of real collaborative ties and group resonance.

Among the works, we are invited into profoundly intimate spaces, repelled by our own defences yet drawn into the knowing gaze of the artist. There is compulsion and grief in the churning allegory of Lucinda Wells’ Extant. Wells shows us that expectations can be a dangerous thing. By using simple devices, something which should be one way is, in fact, another, and we are left asking, where are we now?

And then there’s the sound, you have to be there, but it rips your heart out with unexpected menace. In contrast, there is the silent intimacy and spiritual presence of Martin Everett’s photographs which act as both epitaph and ongoing moment to the memory of his father and the transformation of the physical, domestic space he inhabited. Helen Brooker’s work continues this exploration of the ways we fill the visceral and emotional spaces we inhabit, with reference to ‘horror vacui’, the fear of empty spaces.

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My works, Sleeping Beauty, and Reliquiae, go back to that dark place of transformation and pull up the roots of the question, the bare bones of the narrative, and in doing so there is something sacred about the ground being trodden on, in the mud and gore, which is implied by the simple act of exhuming a buried nightgown. Grace Lau fakes death itself, and in doing so, captures a realm of private intensity which is as unsettling as it is magnificent in scope. Alex Brattell is involved in the act of history-making as he dissembles and reassembles images from his own travels, while Xaverine Bates literally shreds her past, consigning family photographs to memory as mere strips of colour and material which she has knitted into something which gives time a physical and feminist dimension.

Tracy Jones records her journeys through time and space with digital drawings, underlining a sense of impermanence through constant movement, both physically and in new technologies. Patricia Wilson Smith paints out her dreamscapes, piling fiction onto fact as they refer to known coastal walks. Helder Clara draws his vision from the sea at Margate, showing us his ghostly film work with salt, the stuff of sea and life. Franny Swann seduces us into her quiet, gentle works with archiving processes that lie at the heart of her storytelling and her relationship to the arching narratives of history and memory. Roy Eastland does something similar, except that his intensely worked drawings onto vintage Margate postcards draw from a more intimate sense of personal history but which sit within the framework of time and space as jewel-like pieces. Fiction becomes fact with Samantha Cawson and Mark Dumbrell’s collaborative work creating a trail of clues to their invented characters Mr Ferguson and Dorothea’s journey together, creating yet more fictional history to contrast with the violence of reality. Guest artist Tina Hill, from Bristol, draws on the warnings of Genesis with her work Excavating Babel, using the words of humans in book form to reach beyond the heavens, possibly into the hearts and minds of the Gods themselves.

What is clear to me is that within all the work lies a seeking process which is the heart of this exhibition. I hope the artists as storytellers touch on the universal, fundamental and silent spaces in all of us where our own stories are etched deep into our psyches. “ The universe is made of stories, not atoms.”

Muriel Rukeyser

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essay

Stephen Bull

Once Upon A Time…

Temporality, Indexicality and Narrative in Telling Stories: Hastings ‘Once upon a time’ is the phrase that, for centuries, has started the telling of so many stories. In such tales, time and temporality are emphasised right from the first line: ‘Once upon a time’ suggests that the events told should be viewed as having already happened.

The relating of the tale brings the past into the present.

The term ‘Once upon a time’ is the English translation of a phrase that first appears in early European ‘fairy tales’. In Germany, where the Brothers Grimm adapted folklore for their collections of stories in the early 19th century, the phrase ‘Es war einmal’ often starts such tales.

‘Es war einmal’ literally translates to the English ‘It was once’. The nuance of these words are important, as ‘It was once’ appears to firmly state that the story told is real: true fact rather than fanciful fiction.

It could be argued that, by the mid-20th century, modernist art lost touch with the real and the only stories told in the white cube of the gallery space were that of the artists’ biographies as expressed by their abstract works. However, in the 1970s, writers on art, such as Rosalind Krauss, began to identify a trend for something different among newer practice. During 1976, a large group of contemporary artists, working in a diverse range of media (such as video, performance, installation, and photo-realist painting), took over P.S.1, an old public school in New York to mount the exhibition Rooms. Seeing the work in this show as representative of a shift in emerging avant-garde practice, Krauss used some of the work as case studies in her essays ‘Notes on the Index Part 1’ (1976) and, particularly, ‘Notes on the Index Part 2’ (1977). Drawing on film theory, photography and linguistics, Krauss introduced the term ‘indexicality’ to discuss the work. Developed in the 1890s by philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce, Indexicality is often used to describe something that is perceived to have a direct link to the physical world. For example, with its apparent connection with what it depicts, a photograph seems to firmly state of its subject matter, ‘it was once’ (or, to use Roland Barthes’ well-known term in the English translation of his book Camera Lucida, ‘this has been’).

In her two ‘Notes on the Index’ essays, Krauss argued that artists in the 1970s, such as those in the Rooms exhibition, were beginning to make work that, like photography, was a direct trace of the real (rather than primarily or purely abstract). In the exhibition, this was done through a variety of means, often making use of the material qualities of the building itself: from making rubbings to cutting holes in the floor.

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Krauss observed that the old life of the school seeped into the newly produced work, emphasising the temporal paradox also found in photographs, where – as with stories – the past is present.

Krauss compared the sequential experience of the works in the group show to ‘a kind of cinematic narrative’. Narrative is central to cinema studies, where wider analyses of storytelling, such as those of the French Structuralist Tzvetan Todorov, are often employed. Todorov argued that almost all narratives, regardless of medium, follow the same pattern: In the beginning, a state of equilibrium is established, this is then disrupted, leading to a state of disequilibrium. The actions of the characters – in the main part of the narrative – seek to restore equilibrium, and the tale ends when equilibrium is regained.

Crucially, the restored equilibrium is not quite the same as before.

A transformation of some kind has taken place. In the 1959 film North

by Northwest, for example, Cary Grant plays a man who starts the film as a bachelor, who then goes on the run due to mistaken identity.

The film ends with the man married to the woman he meets on the way. And they lived happily ever after…

Although the work in Telling Stories: Hastings is diverse, it is united, to a remarkable extent, by ideas of temporality, indexicality and narrative. Tina Hill presents a tower of ageing books in Excavating Babel. With their worn covers and torn bindings, these volumes are redolent of the past as Kindle turns printed paper to a kind of kindling.

Cathryn Kemp has also engaged in a process of exhumation, burying and then digging up a nightgown. The garment has been transformed. What used to be beautiful emerges resembling a grotesque partially decayed corpse. Kemp’s series of Reliquiae continues this theme, with a series of dirty, dusty objects that suggest a previous engagement with the body – either through being worn, consumed from, or being written on by hand. In Grace Lau’s Ad/dressing Death, her subjects live but lie in a wooden coffin, dressed in the clothes they would wish to wear and holding objects they would want to take with them when dead and buried. Lau stages an inevitable future, in which the outfits worn, items held and, arguably, the people themselves are ‘relics-to-be’. Xaverine Bates has knitted shredded snapshots together, converting images of the past into something new to rid herself of ghosts. As Bates puts it, ‘We all have spectres that we would rather misremember, disremember, dismember’. Temporality and the passing of time, whether times past or times to come, is a theme in all four artists’ work.

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Roy Eastland’s individually titled ink, emulsion, graphite and varnish palimpsests on card are based on photographic postcards of post-World War Two coastlines. The postcard image of an explosive rough sea at Margate joins with the evocative shore of Normandy, while the usual banal postcard messages merge with postmarked warnings urging us ‘DON’T WASTE BREAD’ – all these components combining to send the still fresh events of the war back home. Lucinda Wells’ shots of crashing waves in Extant 2012 relate to a desire to make whole a partial family past. Yet the fractions of seconds frozen in the photographs and the moments of movement can never frame the full ongoing story. Similarly, the impressively detailed, circular paintings by Patricia Wilson Smith that focus in close on subjects such as beaches record transient instants, before sands shift and tides change. Un Respiro (One Breath) is a short film by Helder Clara that also uses the sea as a metaphor for the ebb and flow of transient human life, as the traces of figures on the floor are uncovered from beneath layers of salt. The film itself, played in reverse so that it starts at the end and ends at the start, is a record of the performance – the impermanence of the event made permanent. The sea and the coast are used in these works as indexical traces with highly emotive and often very personal connotations.

Places and objects can be archives. Helen Brooker’s subtle, textural prints inspired by a series of photographs evoke the ghosts that fill a house emptied of its contents, including, in this instance, a hoard of books (echoing Hill’s tower of tomes). Her work serves as both a subjective document and wider evidence of the extremes to which collecting can go. The house in Martin Everett’s colour Lypophrenia: Domestic Landscapes is neat, tidy and uncannily empty. The suggestion that this is a house haunted by the past comes from what we don’t see.

Like family albums or Facebook uploads, the stories lie in what is left out. Alexander Brattell makes a point of his subjective approach in Qualia: Photographs 2010-12. In this series, choices have been made to photograph in detailed black and white places and objects that evidence the intervention of human gestures or wear and tear over time. Franny Swann appropriates the objects themselves for her series Requiem For a Lost Language, where wooden print trays that would have held letters become the home for disappearing insect life. In Homeland Security another past, that of the Holocaust, is evoked through a wasp’s nest inside a bell jar. Places and objects collect the past and create a narrative that leads to now.

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The old technologies of Swann’s objects contrast with Tracy Jones’ use of a mobile phone to create her digital drawings, where a virtue is made of the pixilation of expressive gestures. Jones’ images are made on public transport, recording her fleeting, blurred glimpses of the landscape from train windows. Another journey is the basis for Samantha Cawson and Mark Dumbrell’s walking tour The Tale of Mr Ferguson and Dorothea. As with Jones’ practice, materiality and digital technologies both play a role in the work, with the audience engaging with physical objects, such as a Post Office savings book, and online elements. Beginning at the story’s end, the tour stops off around Hastings at significant points in the relationship between the principle characters – as participants discover not just whether the protagonists lived happily ever after, but what happened in their past.

In the end, the artists in Telling Stories: Hastings are storytellers.

As with all narratives, the starting points for the tales they tell are what happened once upon a time. Often in these works, a past state of equilibrium has been disrupted. Something has been lost. The works themselves take the indexical traces of that past and bring them into the present, in the process transforming them into something new.

These works do not attempt to restore or regain the past, but to reflect upon it and reconsider it for the future.

Stephen Bull Brighton, July 2012

Stephen Bull is a writer, artist and lecturer. He is the author of Photography (Routledge, 2010) and writes for magazines and journals including Source: The Photographic Review and Photoworks. He has exhibited at Tate Britain and The Photographers’ Gallery, London. He is Course Leader for Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham.

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Xaverine Bates Knitting the Shreds Photographs from the past are physical incarnations of memories. Heavy, laminated paper carted around in boxes or albums every time you move house. Baggage.

Right Knitting the Shreds: installation view Knitted, shredded photographs, staples, knitting needle Dimensions: 35cm x 170cm (approx.)

Photo credit: A. Brattell Below Knitting the Shreds: detail

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I decided to shed my baggage and shred every photo that I’d carried around since I was 20 years old. A physical form of therapy. Then staple the shreds to make threads. Then use the traditionally feminine craft my mother taught me to knit the threads to make another version of history.

The stories I tell about my past are embellished, fragmented, subjective, prejudiced, emotional, passionate, dispassionate. We all have spectres that we would rather mis-remember, disremember, dismember. This piece is the result of months of dismemberment to make a thing of beauty, a thing in its own right, a thing that is more than the sum of its parts. An obsessively knitted tale woven from old bits, with a few treasured fragments interspersed here and there.

Detail of saved photograph shreds Dimensions: 15cm x 0.5cm

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Alexander Brattell “ One has to photograph one’s own history; all the rest is tourism.”

John Gossage

Right Harold Place August 2011 Below La Brea August 2011

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Left North La Brea August 2011 Below Marine Gardens July 2011

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Helen Brooker All that remained were the dusty lines ghosting the absent furniture on the faded wallpaper – once the house was emptied of its contents, the memories continued to resonate, becoming absorbed into the fabric of the silent house.

This strange silence: a silence without profiles, without edges, that penetrates like deaf water Like the tide held in suspense by the moon, the silence slowly covers me Dulce Maria Loynaz

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I have mused on the idea that the house is a witness to events – its secrets kept behind the respectability of lace curtains and locked doors.

Left interior (sorrow) 2012 (detail) Solar etching and collagraph 14cm x 34.5cm Right interior (silence) 2012 Etching and collagraph 25cm x 55cm Next page interior (within) 2010 Solar etching and collagraph 48cm x 73cm

Samantha Cawson & Mark Dumbrell

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Below, opposite and next page Mr A. Ferguson’s Post Office savings book 2011

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The Tale of Mr Ferguson and Dorothea: A Walking Tour Concerned with the notions of community engagement, still-life performance, fictional histories and storytelling, a narrated walking tour around Hastings has been put into place. On five occasions Mr A. Ferguson has altered Dorothea’s life and this is a project of their story.

Follow the directions of artist and collector Samantha Cawson and MargatePhotoFest Director Mark Dumbrell to uncover and materialise the plot and characters. A most curious tale indeed!

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Helder Clara Left, below, opposite and next page Un Respiro 2011 Digital video (3mins 30secs)

Un Respiro With ‘Un Respiro’ I am exploring the relationship between humankind and the sea. We are all drawn to the sea on an elemental level. Salt and water exist within us in large amounts and like the sea we seem to move through life on a tide, ebbing and flowing, reaching out to life with expectation and then sometimes falling back with disappointment.

This film is a symbolic representation of time, impermanence, being by the ocean and the way we are all affected by the rhythms of the sea and how that rhythm is simply another manifestation of a breath. There is a rise and fall to life much like tides, where all things are in a permanent state of flux. It was with the awareness of the rhythmic nature of life and specifically life by the sea that I called this film ‘Un Respiro’ (one breath).

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Roy Eastland East Kent Daily Time Slip 2007 Ink, emulsion, graphite and varnish on card 9.5cm x 10cm

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“…will be seeing you soon” 2011 Graphite, acrylic gesso and varnish on board 8.5cm x 13.5cm Next page Mulberry 2007-2009 Graphite, emulsion, ink and varnish on card 9cm x 14cm

I love drawing. My drawings are produced as separate works of art but they can often be linked by recurring themes of personal memory, history, East Kent and the sea. They are worked on over long periods of time and their outcomes are always unpredictable.

I graduated from Edinburgh College of Art in 1996 and have exhibited in numerous group and solo exhibitions including: The BP Portrait Award, The Hunting Art Prizes, The Discerning Eye, London Art Fair, Frieze Art Fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, The Turner Contemporary Open and The Jerwood Drawing Prize.

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Martin Everett

Left Lypophrenia: Domestic Landscape no.22 2012 Analogue transfer to DiBond 102cm x 102cm Above Lypophrenia: Domestic Landscape no.17 2012 Analogue transfer to DiBond 102cm x 102cm

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Opposite Lypophrenia: Domestic Landscape no.4 2012 Analogue transfer to DiBond 102cm x 102cm

Lypophrenia: Domestic Landscapes In this mixing of image and event, imagined and real time, the lived quality of the work comes to the fore. The house locates its dweller. Yet as vision lasts for all who can see, it, like the house itself, tends to slip from the subjective into being. It becomes impersonal in the inclusive sense of ceasing to differentiate or displace us. Thus, in this composite duration we find extensity and inclusion. We slip into being unimpeded by the guidance of subjective narration, through the embrace of the house, which is to say, the very seat of extensity.

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Tina Hill Excavating Babel My work in general is about “new life from old”; I am interested in how artefacts can be discarded by one society only to be sought after and conserved by another. I often draw upon archaeology, geology and museums as sources of information and inspiration.

Excavating Babel is composed of over 2,300 books that were destined to be destroyed. They now form a work that is about loss of communication.

As part of the “excavation” of each book the covers were removed so we do not know what story each book tells. You can enter the spiral and become isolated by walls of inaccessible words.

Excavating Babel is a monument to books and the stories they tell and on a personal level, the important place they have held in my life.

Excavating Babel will be exhibited at Electro Studios Project Art Space, St. Leonards, 10-11, 17-18 November, 2012, as the Telling Stories: Fringe.

Excavating Babel 2009 Installation of over 2,300 disused books 300cm x 250cm (height variable)

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Excavating Babel I 2010 Photopolymer/ gravure print 83cm x 58cm

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Excavating Babel III 2010 Photopolymer/gravure print 42cm x 67cm

Tracy Jones An experimental approach to drawing forms the core of my work and I often use a mobile phone to make drawings. The drawings manifest as flat pixilated sketches akin to etching. What interests me about the medium is the balance between the artist’s hand and technology.

In considering the physical qualities of screen colour, RGB Pixel3 subjectively represents virtual building blocks in their simplest form as single pixel code (ASCII) made three dimensional in paper. The final drawing explores inner thought, a stream of consciousness, subtly disturbing and yet emotionally seductive, suggesting narrative and inviting interpretation.

St Leonards, 19 January 2012 Digital mobile phone drawing Size variable dependent on mode of presentation

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Fragmentation, language, memory and presence.

These works represent explorations into relationships between analogue and digital, contemplation and physicality. It is these strands that I will be exploring in my work for Telling Stories: Hastings, creating a personal expression of place.

Opposite Out of me now my mind can pour (detail) 2012 Ink and graphite on paper 60cm x 45cm Below RGB Pixel3 2010 Printed paper 5cm cubed x 3

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Cathryn Kemp Reliquiae 2012 Lightboxes, Duratrans prints under perspex Each piece 29cm x 21cm x 10cm Photo credit: A. Brattell

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Sleeping Beauty 2012 Installation element; 21 iPhone photographs as composite on DiBond Each image 21cm x 14.8cm, as composite 150cm x 50cm

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“ Between the idea and the reality Between the motion and the act Falls the shadow�

T.S Eliot – The Hollow Men

My practice is concerned with transformative processes, bringing that which was in the dark into the light, as a form of emotional and metaphysical archaeology. Working within the aesthetic of the museum, I am interested in traces of things, of remains and of suggested and realised intentions.

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Grace Lau Ad/dressing Death Using the genre of studio portrait photography, my new work explores the fear and fascination that we feel about death. For the mass media, death is almost exclusively represented in the context of violence and war, disease and decay.

How can I photograph the concept of death and avoid such cliches? The Victorians dressed their dead in beautiful garments to be photographed as if alive, for sentimental memorabilia. My death portraits are of living people, posing as though in death, dressed in their selected garments and holding a favourite personal object.

My last project involved an embellished, constructed exotic Oriental portrait studio in which I photographed the diverse ‘21st Century Types’ of modern Hastings society. This new project is in sharp contrast and presents a ‘studio’ of stark, pared-down size and shape: a black wooden coffin in which to frame my portraits of death.

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Ad/dressing Death: A Portrait 2012 Colour negative film plus digital print

Ad/dressing Death: A Portrait 2012 Colour negative film plus digital print

From the series 21st Century Types Hastings, 2005

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Franny Swann Below and opposite Homeland Security 2012 Glass bell jar, wasp nest, steel rod, wasps, acrylic, marker pen 23cm x 23cm

Above and opposite Requiem for a Lost Language 2009 Four hot press wooden print trays, plaster, acrylic, cake wire, dress pattern tissue 37cm x 82cm x 3cm

‘What was the problem that caused them to arrest you?’ the interrogator asked.

I said I didn’t know.

‘The organisation isn’t stupid’, he said. ‘It never catches people who aren’t guilty. Now think again. What did you do wrong?’

‘I don’t know’, I said again.

Interrogation of Vann Nath, Phom Peng. 1978

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After 9/11 Judge Andrew Napolitano wrote “In a democracy, personal liberties are rarely diminished overnight. Rather, they are lost gradually, by acts of well-meaning people, with good intentions, amid public approval. But the subtle loss of freedom is never recognised until the crisis is over and we look back in horror. And then it’s too late”.

Somewhere between these two statements lies my work.

Central is the concept of artist as curator.

Archivings of loss are ordered by me as collector, creator, and final arbiter. My practice is underpinned and referenced by memory and memorial; a citation to family members lost in the Holocaust.

Lucinda Wells Below and opposite Extant 2012 Four images: Extract from Extant 2012 Still and moving image

I use the camera (still or moving) with or without sound to explore the most fundamental of intervals, the gap, whether it be between me and you, knowing and not knowing, time and distance, beginnings and endings, the past and the future. I am interested in the possibilities of seeing and how the image only ever reveals a fragment of the story.

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Patricia Wilson Smith Since late last year I’ve spent short periods of time in Cornwall, where the rolling waves of the Atlantic never fail to thrill and impress me. North Cornwall is littered with the remains of its mining past and evidence of economic fortunes and failures. Its rocky coves are a far cry from Margate and Hastings’ wide open beaches, but it shares common economic features – high dependence on tourism, limited opportunities for employment, and the romanticised residues of an ‘heroic’ past.

The two paintings in this exhibition were inspired by these photographs of small and transient pieces of landscape. They encapsulate my connection with the landscape, my actual and remembered walks through it, and my reflections on its fragility.

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Previous page Sandform Digital photograph Left Veins Digital photograph

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acknowledgements Arts Council England Arts Council England South East Hastings Museum & Art Gallery Hastings Borough Council East Sussex County Council Coastal Currents visual arts festival 2012 Brighton Photo Fringe 2012 Zeroh Photo hub group Electro Studios Project Art Space Radiator Arts From Pier To Eternity Hastings Urban Bikes Martel Colour Print Hastings & St Leonards Observer Hastings Online Times MargatePhotoFest Hastings Arts Forum.

special thanks Michael Cooke, ACE Susan Ward, Catherine Harvey, HMAG Michael Hambridge, HBC Sally Staples, ESCC Sarah Yates, Jo Petkiewicz, Tina Morris, Coastal Currents/Creative Coast Andrew Moran, Grace Lau, Phg/BPF Claire Lloyd, Jane Noble, Brighton Photo Fringe Clare, Ollie, Simon, Playne Design Colin Booth, Electro Patrick Nicholson, FPTE/HUB Mary Hooper, Erin Veness, Radiator Arts Alexander Brattell, Zetetic Press/Photology Hannah Collisson, Hastings & St Leonards Observer Nick Weekes, HAF Tracy Jones, Telling Stories website Anna McNay, Critic Community Bike Workshop Yumino Seki Stephen Bull Duncan Brannan, KCC & the many others who contributed to Telling Stories: Hastings.

Project Director & Curator Cathryn Kemp Committee Grace Lau Lucinda Wells Xaverine Bates Franny Swann Martin Everett Alexander Brattell

Phg

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£15.00 ISBN – 9780956977342

Reliquiae: Cathryn Kemp (Photo credit: A. Brattell)