Stains & Traces at Hastings Arts Forum

Stains and Traces has taken a regular appearance in the HAF calendar in memory of Ian Welsh, a former Chair and champion of the Arts Forum who sadly died a few years ago, who has left this powerful exhibition theme as his legacy. Under the invited co-curatorship of artists Carly Ralph and Mary Morris – alongside selected artists Denise Jones, Annabel Faraday and Debbie Lyddon – HOT’s Lauris Morgan-Griffiths was eager to see how they had interpreted the theme.

From the title sequence of a film one can normally tell if it is going to be good or not. This is how I felt when I entered Hastings Arts Forum to see the new exhibition Stains & Traces VI. It was a ‘stand and take it in’ moment, feeling that I was in the presence of an intelligent, show of textile and mixed media art. The staging – or hang – is dramatic, inviting, warm, intriguing. And somehow emotional. A curl of white linen scoops over the centre of the room, a whorl of fabric dangles beside it. Then scanning around the room there is a lot to take in, although mainly monochromatic, you can feel there are narratives within to investigate.

I don’t know why this art show seemed so particularly to speak to me directly. Each of the five artists have examined in personal and different ways the presence, absence and residues of human existence. They show a respect, curiosity and humanity for people, materials, other lives. I think I identified with the marks and stains honouring ordinary lives that define women and wrap around us forming our identities.

I have always been attracted to Carly Ralph’s art, imbued as it is in history and curiosity. Book lovers and dealers often say when they first pick up a book they find it irresistible not to smell it. It feels that if Ralph does not do that, she has, at least, to run her fingers over it and let it communicate with her. These old ghosts of books, even if falling apart, have a history, someone has loved them and their interior knowledge; too valuable to be discarded.

With these rescued tomes she has given them a new life. In one installation she has unearthed the names of the occupants of one house in the Lavatoria area of St Leonards over 19 decades. Each book bears the name and details of the resident in its title. Each book would have a story to tell.

 The other artists have also tapped into stories – although stories are really the underbelly of all artists’ work. Standing by Denise Jones’ beautiful linen hand towel, stained with memory and experience, I found it quite visceral. The feeling of women’s work, normally unrecorded and never ending.

Jones says “I relish ambiguity. I ask the viewer to be puzzled by the title, to imagine, to think and feel, to be touched … They might consider that a hide suitcase could reference skin as a container; a marked tablecloth could conjure lost conversations, or an empty envelope could suggest a letter that has long since disappeared, a fragment missing from the record.”

Mary Morris has created little books of her observations of the landscape around her, made after quiet contemplation meditating on the traces of iron ore mining around the woodland and streams near her home; they are like the layering of the landscape and streams as the thoughts and meditations have dropped, distilled into her tiny books. Morris comments “This process is like the sedimentary layering of the land itself – an accretion of the small details that make up the bigger picture of place.”

Annabel Faraday has collected the wood, metal scraps off the beach at Dungeness; detritus to some, treasures to others. Battered and pummelled by the sea, the objects have been broken and changed but not defeated. Faraday has carefully transformed them by adding her own stoneware and collaged them with their beautiful patina into artful, found sculptures.

Inspired by sails, tarpaulin, nets around the Norfolk coast Debbie Lyddon shows her great love of history, seafaring craft in her installations. Traditionally, weather proofing and preserving these fabrics from the salt and onslaught of the sea, local mariners would coat the tarpaulins with wax, linseed oil bitumen. Lyddon  has gathered natural materials from her local landscape and processed to colour the cloth – linking the old ways to the land, the inhabitants, the present day.

It is an intelligently curated, cohesive exhibition. That is not to say it is without emotion or connection. It is all those things. Stains and traces are clearly evident in the effecting marks drenched with the artist’s  specific personal stories, experience, lives and memory.

A show to be seen and reflected upon.

Stains & Traces VI is at Hastings Arts Forum, 20 Marine Court, TN38 0DX until 6 March, 2022. Open 11am–5pm Tuesday to Sunday.

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