From left to right: Lucy Brennan Shiel, Stephanie Fawbert, Julia Hilton and Marie-Louise Miller

Drawing aliveness alive

This group show from Lucy Brennan Shiel, Julia Hilton, Stephanie Fawbert and Marie Louise Miller seems very much in the spirit of the current cultural vibe in Hastings. Sarah Lloyd applauds strong work by strong women.

We find here four powerful women intent on clearer connection to the deeper rhythms, assumptions and choices going on within their perception and also to being vibrantly embodied and warmly responsive to a wider world. And all passionately engaged with exploring what being embodied and embedded in inner and outer, time and space really is, this thing we all do everyday mostly on automatic pilot.

What these artists are reaching for here in drawing, could arguably be viewed as the deepest most necessary tool of social and cultural change. Arising as ourselves, and standing our ground as vibrant, responsive, innately intelligent humans, and trusting this enough to allow ourselves to become creatively active and engaged in ongoing life. This means opening to and exploring the energy of our own living self before the sovereign agents map their permissions upon us.

The right to exist is, in my view, a human right, unfortunately though, it isn’t. Ethically, economically and politically we still frame human subjectivity in a living body, as an interior secondary space. The primary focus of the law is the status of the subject, instead of subjectivity in the lived body, as the home of consciousness. In sovereign law to count as existing, you must first of all belong to a nation state who can then accept or exclude your consciousness and existence on a whim.

It has been a vivid feast then to see so many events in this year’s excellent Root 1066 festival, questioning and exploring the roots of our narrated identity as subjects in history. Many chose to focus our attention away from our ‘symbolic’ status as the nation state’s subjects to the lived or ‘phenomenological’ status of a living person in flows of diverse conditions for their living subjectivity now.

This is clearly what Theresa May misses when she says, “citizens of the world are citizens of nowhere”.

That many of us prefer to invest our care, energy and perception in what is ‘now here’.

Go enjoy this excellent show and chat to the artists about embodiment and perception this weekend.

Opening event: Friday 2 December 6–9pm
Opening hours: 11am–6pm Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 December
29 St Helen’s Crescent, Hastings TN34 2EN

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