Turner Prize 2023: Eastbourne of East Sussex celebrates with the Turner Prize at the Towner Gallery

The East Sussex art gallery Towner Eastbourne is celebrating its centenary, and the cherry on the cake for its year-long celebration is its hosting of an exhibition showcasing the work by the four shortlisted artists nominated for the international Turner Prize 2023, the world’s leading prize for contemporary art.

The Turner Prize exhibition, free to view at the Eastbourne Towner, spans galleries and spaces across all three floors of the building.   In the Welcome Space on the ground floor, visitors are urged to see films on the individual artists’ practices, with information on the history of the Turner Prize and details about the rest of Towner’s programme, including artist talks. 

The four shortlisted nominees for Turner 2023 on show at Eastbourne Towner are British artist Barbara Walker; Rory Pilgrim, who works between the UK and The Netherlands;  Jesse Darling, who lives and works in Berlin and London; and London-based Swedish artist Ghislaine Leung.

Joe Hill, Director and CEO of Towner Eastbourne welcomed the Turner Prize 2023 to Eastbourne, as the centrepiece of Towner Eastbourne's Centenary year.  "Founded as 'an art gallery for the people,' the gallery has always championed living artists and has been at the forefront of showcasing and collection contemporary art in the UK, said Hill.  "What better way to celebrate this legacy than to bring one of the world's best-known prizes for the visual arts to the region."

Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain, and chair of the Turner Prize 2023 jury, said. "Jesse Darling, Ghislaine Leung, Rory Pilgrim and Barbara Walker have remarkably varied approaches to creating art that actively responds to and reflects the world around us - engaging with the social, economic, cultural and political issues of our time.  The Turner Prize offers a fascinating snapshot of contemporary British art now, and a key part of its popularity is its ability to spotlight the rich cultural offerings of our towns and cities on its travels to a truly unmissable movement in Turner Prize history.  I look forward to this year's exhibition being enjoyed by East Sussex's residents and visitors alike."

The Turner Prize* exhibition is now open and free to view until April 14th 2024,  spanning galleries and spaces across all three floors of the Towner.   In the Welcome Space on the ground floor, visitors are urged to see films on the individual artists’ practices, with information on the history of the Turner Prize and details about the rest of Towner’s programme, including artist talks. 

The winner of this prestigious prize will be announced at an award ceremony on December 5th, to take place next door in the iconic "Winter Garden", a Grade II listed events building, designed by architect Henry Currey and built by the seventh Duke of Devonshire in 1875. 

Two of Barbara Walker's Proof of Burden portraits (2022) in mixed media with graphite,
conte, charcoal and pastel on paper.

Finalist Barbara Walker works in a range of media and formats, from embossed works on paper to paintings on canvas and large scale charcoal wall drawings.  Growing up in Birmingham, Walker's experiences have shaped a practice concerned with issues of class and power, gender, race, representation and belonging.

Walker was nominated for her presentation entitled Burden of Proof at Sharjah Biennial 15. In this body of work, Walker brings careful attention and visibility to individuals and families affected by the Windrush scandal.

For the exhibition at Towner, Walker's presentation features large scale charcoal figures drawn directly onto the gallery wall, demonstrating the artist has a bold statement and a strong message to make.  On the adjacent walls is a series of works on paper. 

Walker's monochromatic portraits feature people who were impacted by the Windrush scandal and each portrait is layered over by hand-drawn reproductions of documents that evidence their right to remain in the UK. 

These intimate portraits invite the viewer to come face to face with real people whose struggle for legitimacy to remain in the UK and to consider the true consequences of political decision-making and the complexities of diasporic identity.

The jury applauded Walker's ability to use portraits of monumental scale to tell stories of a similarly monumental nature, whilst maintaining a profound tenderness and intimacy across the full scope of her work.

Rory Pilgrim is a multi-disciplinary artist working across song writing, composition, films, texts, drawings, paintings and live performances.  Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience.

A still from Rory Pilgrim's RAFTS, 2022, HD Video (1:06:55).
Pilgrim interweaves stories, poems, music and film, to reflect on times of change and struggle
during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Courtesy of andriesse~eyck galerie.

Rory Pilgrim was nominated for the commission RAFTS at Serpentine and Barking Town Hall, and a live performance of the work at Cadogan Hall, London.  Pilgrim's presentation "Rafts (2022" on the first floor at the Towner is a hour-long film featuring a seven-song oratorio narrated by eight residents of Barking and Dagenham in London from Green Shoes Arts, reflecting on what the symbol of a raft means to them through song, music, animation and poetry.  They are joined by singers Declan Rowe John, Robyn Haddon, Kayden Fearon and members of Barking and Dagenham Youth Dance.  The film is a soulful, emotional body of work made during the Covid-19 pandemic and the raft is positioned as a symbol of support keeping us afloat in challenging and precarious circumstances. 

Timed screenings of Rafts and Rafts: Live are presented with paintings, drawings, writings and sculptures in the same room and in the space outside the room that expand on the theme.

Rory Pilgrim's Putting The World To Bed, 2021, on oil, crayon
and nail polish on wooden panel.

The jury praised the film project as a standout example of social practice.  They felt that Pilgrim's beautiful and affecting musical arrangements gave light to their collaborators' voices and that the confidence and vulnerability of the performance reflected the strength of the relationship between artist and community.

Jesse Darling works in sculpture, installation, video, drawing, sound, text and performance, using materlialist poetics to explore and reimagine the everyday technologies that represent how we live.  Darling has often combined industrial materials such as sheet metal and welded steel with everyday objects to explore ideas of the domestic and the institutional, home and state, stability and instability, function and dysfunction, growth and collapse.

Jesse Darling's installation showcase metal pedestrian barriers that appear to have legs that walk across the room

Darling was nominated for his solo No Medals, No Ribbons at Modern Art Oxford and Enclosures at Camden Art Centre in London.  Darling's work encompasses sculptures and installations which evoke the vulnerability of the human body and the precariousness of power structures.  The sculptural works Corpus (Half-staff) and Inter Alia I (both 2022) form a fragmented colonnade in the gallery.  Here, concrete and polystyrene pills are topped wth barbed wire, venetian blinds and net curtains. Pedestrian barriers and prickly anti-bird spikes also echo a hostile and controlling element of the built environment, with a jarring proximity to our domestic everyday.

The jury was struck by Darling's ability to manipulate materials in ways that skillfully express the messy reality of life.  They felt that these exhibitions revealed the breadth and integrity of Darling's practice, exposing the world's underlying fragility and refusing to make oneself appear legible and functioning to others.

Ghislaine Leung, Fountains. Installation View at Simian, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2023. Courtesy the artist and Simian, Copenhagen; and Maxwell Graham, New York; and Cabinet, London.
Photo credit GRAYSC.

Ghislane Leung's practice takes a critical look at the condition of art production, its presentation and circulation.  Leung has developed a process of art making that results in "score-based artworks".  The "scores" are text-based instructions or descriptions that are realised by the gallery team in close conversation with the artist.

Ghislane Leung's Fountain

Leung was nominated for her solo exhibition Fountains at Simian, Copenhagen.  Leung's work takes the form of "scores" - sets of instructions which test the boundaries of the gallery space.  Fountains (2022) is an artwork created from a score that simply states "a fountain installed in the exhibition space to cancel sound".

At Towner, Leung's presentation also features a baby monitor installed in the art store, broadcasting live to the exhibition space, and a wall drawing representing the hours that Leung can dedicate to working in her studio.  There is also a row of children's toy houses and toy household items.  These installations reflect on the realities of an artist role as a mother and highlight her interest in the time, labour and support structures required to make and maintain artworks.

The jury particularly commended the warm, humorous and transcendental qualities that lay behind the sleek aesthetic and conceptual nature of Leung's work, as well as her commitment to challenging the way art is produced and circulated.

*Turner Prize, one of the best-known prizes for the visual arts in the world, aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art.  Established in 1984, the Prize is awarded to a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work in the previous twelve months.

Members of the Turner Prize 2023 jury are Martin Clark, Director, Camden Art Centre; Cédric Fauq, Chief Curator, Capc musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux; Melanie Keen, Director of Wellcome Collection; and Helen Nisbet, Artistic Director, Art Night. Alex Farquharson, Director of Tate Britain, was chair of the 2023 jury.

The Turner Prize winner will be awarded £25,000 with £10,000 awarded to the other shortlisted artists.

The Turner Prize, established n 1984, aims to promote public debate around new developments in contemporary British art. It is named after the renowned British painter JMW Turner (1775-1851) and is awarded each year to a British artist for an outstanding exhibition or other presentation of their work.

Turner Prize 2023 is curated by Noelle Collins, Exhibitions and Offsite Curator at Towner Eastbourne.  It is one of the major events of Towner 100, a year-long centenary celebration of arts and culture across Eastbourne.  Towner Eastbourne kicked off the year of celebration with Barbara Hepworth: Art & Life earlier this year until September 2023.  Coinciding with the Turner Prize is Eastbourne ALIVE - a wide range of public art commissions and events taking place across the town.

All photos at the Turner Prize 2023 exhibition/ Towner Eastbourne by Lucia Carpio. Others are appropriately credited.

Textiles and Exhibition: Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft of East Sussex hosts major exhibition honouring founding textile designer and her partner

One of the main textile exhibits presently on show at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft in its current exhibition - Double Weave: Bourne and Allen's Modernist Textiles* - is a piece of history linked to the celebrated Royal Festival Hall in London's Southbank Centre, built as part of the Festival of Britain, a national exhibition held in 1951 to boost morale and celebrate British culture in the aftermath of World War II. 

While the Festival was intended to showcase British design, art, and technology, the designers and makers of the vast curtains (shown above and at right) commissioned for the auditorium of the Festival Hall, were not credited in any of the Festival Hall's historical record.  

However a photograph accompanying the exhibited curtain at the Ditchling Museum does show the same curtain in the background when the then Princess Elizabeth attended the first concert of the National Federation of Jazz Organisation at the Festival Hall in 1951.  The photographer of this picture is also unknown.

Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft

Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft, in celebrating its 10th anniversary of its major redevelopment, is now proudly honouring its founding textile designer Hilary Bourne and her partner (in life and creative practice) Barbara Allen  who were the original designers and makers of the said curtains produced when they won the competition for the project in 1951.

Hilary Bourne and Barbara Allen in 1951, setting up a loom. 
Photo courtesy of Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft

The weight and thickness of the original curtains, measuring two metres by two metres, reflect their role in controlling the acoustics in the concert venue at the Royal Festival Hall.

E-J Scott explains the network of of women textile designers in the modernist movement. 

Curator of the exhibition, producer and academic  E-J Scott said the designers Bourne and Allen are billed as two of the most significant textile designers of the modernist period, yet they remain largely unknown - until now.  The exhibition now gives space to their story and speak to the invisibility of women as leading modernist designers.

The pair ran an internationally successful textile studio, designing and making a variety of fabrics for major British retail establishments, from tweed for Fortnum & Mason, to furnishing fabric for Heals and scarves for Liberty's, as well as the interiors of the UK's first jet planes.

After winning the commission to design and make curtains for the Royal Festival Hall, Bourne and Allen won the commission to make the costumes for the multi-Oscar winning 1959 film Ben Hur.  Scott said the two designers quoted an outrageous price for the challenging project thinking that film producers at MGM would not take them on.  An exhibit at the Ditchling Museum shows the costume Bourne and Allen created for Ben-Hur main star Charlton Heston, but however the designers were not credited in any literature associated with the movie.

The Ditchling exhibition rectifies the accomplishments of Bourne and Allen with a wealth of examples of their work who were pioneers in developing new constructions as well as using new yarns, such as lurex.  It also highlights textiles from other non-European cultures that has informed the duo's creativity and through their own research and clever insights became part of their modernist textile developments.  

Textile historian Dr Jane Hattrick said she discovered in her meticulous research on the influence of the Bourne and Allen, a network of female textile creators who were instrumental in the modernist textile movement of the 20th century.  A special section of the exhibition - Map of intimacies: Women's Networks of Love, Friendship and Textile Practice demonstrates the intricate connections among the network of designers.  The exhibition speaks to how women's close working intimacy in the modernist movement informs creative pursuits. 

Other co-curators who also worked with Scott on the exhibition included textile historian Veronica Isaac (course leader MA Fashion Curation at UAL), Shelley Tobin (textile curator and dress historian), Jane Trais (women's historian) and Suzanne Rowland (costume historian).

Objects on display are from Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft’s collection, with some key loans from other institutions. Work by two contemporary artists will complement the exhibition. 

Omeima Mudawi-Rowlings' "Drawn to the Light" installation in the
Introductory Gallery leading to the Double Weave exhibition in Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft

Accompanying the Double Weave exhibition is an immersive installation - Drawn to the Light - by textile artist Omeima Mudawi-Rowlings MBE in the Introductory Gallery, featuring textiles coloured with natural dyes using techniques pioneered by Bourne and Allen. It explores Mudawi-Rowlings' own experience as a Black deaf artist with Sudanese heritage, using layering of text and images in English, BSL and Arabic.  The installation is comprised of lanterns and a pathway of personal symbols and meanings.  The experience of being seen and not seen, and of textiles often being dismissed as "domestic" or "women’s work" is part of this story. 

Poppy Fuller Abbott
 with her textile creation inspired by Bourne and Allen.

In addition, Sussex-based weaver and dyer Poppy Fuller Abbott (pictured left) has also created textile samples in the style of Bourne and Allen’s work.  Visitors can also watch a film of Poppy at work on the loom at the exhibition. 

Poppy studied Textile Design in London, where she specialised in weaving at Central Saint Martins. After graduating, she began studying natural dyes, and received the Clothworkers Award at Cockpit Arts, where she had a studio for 2 years. Her practice, POP Studio, is based at Studio50 in Hove.

Steph Fuller, Director, Ditchling Museum said “In this 10th year since the creation of Ditchling Museum of Art+ Craft in its current form, it’s the perfect moment to celebrate Hilary Bourne our co-founder, and showcase the fantastic Modernist textiles she created with her partner Barbara Allen.  This is a rare chance to see this work and discover their Modernist legacy, alongside a new textile installation by Omeima Mudawi-Rawlings which references their lives and techniques, bringing them into a new contemporary context.”

*Double Weave: Bourne and Allen's Modernist Textiles at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft runs until April 14th 2024.

Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft is home to a permanent collection that showcases the work of artists and crafts people living and working in Ditchling – a village which nurtured some of the 20th century’s most innovative and creative ideas in crafts and design. The museum presents two new exhibitions a year alongside the permanent collection.

Photos by Lucia Carpio at Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft unless otherwise noted.

Art: Sussex-based public art project announced featuring renowned contemporary artists' responses to Eric Ravilious paintings

Newhaven is a charming coastal town located in East Sussex, England and situated at the mouth of the River Ouse.  While it is nestled between the bustling city of Brighton to the west and the resort town of Eastbourne to the east, Newhaven has experienced significant developments that have enhanced its appeal as a tourist destination and a place for artistic inspiration. 

Newhaven Harbour - 1936 - Eric Ravilious
Newhaven Harbour lies within walking distance of Furlongs, the home of artist and Ravilious’ friend Peggy Angus. Ravilious would regularly visit Angus and undertake painting trips in the area, including Newhaven, where he was attracted by the busy port, ships, and industrial machinery. 
Image: Towner Eastbourne

With a rich maritime heritage, offering a unique blend of natural beauty, Newhaven has had inspired many artists to convey its landscape and beauty on canvas.  Among them is the well-known British painter, designer, book illustrator and wood-engraver  Eric Ravilious (22 July 1903 – 2 September 1942),  who grew up in Sussex, and is particularly known for his watercolours of the South Downs, and other English landscapes and vernacular art with an off-kilter, modernist sensibility and clarity. 

Now Newhaven has in recent years seen improvements in infrastructure, waterfront redevelopment, and a renewed focus on promoting the arts and culture, with a thriving arts scene.   Local galleries, studios, and community centres have flourished, providing artists with opportunities to showcase their work and interact with the public. These spaces also host regular exhibitions, workshops, and events, fostering a vibrant creative atmosphere in the town.

Vision Machines (Cliff). 2023 Charlotte Prodger
Image: Towner Eastbourne

This August, a free trail of giant billboard-scale artworks will pop up all over Newhaven. Entitled "Follow Ravilious - Newhaven Views", this project celebrates paintings of the town by Ravilious who was drawn to Newhaven's bustling harbour, fishing boats, and the ever-changing play of light on the water. These maritime themes can be seen in many of his paintings, where he skillfully portrayed the interplay of water, sky, and human activity.

Ahead of the Turner Prize coming to Eastbourne to the Towner Gallery this Autumn,  the Newhaven project will feature some of Ravilious’s best loved images of Newhaven, with responses by contemporary artists Charlotte Prodger, Mark Titchner, Emily Allchurch, and Jo Lamb who have been inspired by Ravilious and the modern Newhaven landscape.   The four contemporary artists had been chosen by a panel of arts professionals and cultural leaders, according to Towner Eastbourne which curated and organised the project with the support of the Newhaven Enterprise Zone. The Ravilious works are all in the Towner Eastbourne Collection.  

The trail opens on 1 August and stays up until the end of October 2023.

Each artist’s work will sit alongside a Ravilious painting completing a dialogue between Newhaven’s past, present, and future and exploring Newhaven’s intersecting marine, rural, and industrial landscapes. They will link Newhaven’s dynamic past with the town as it is today, undergoing a renaissance, bursting with creativity, and attracting new residents, businesses, and investment. 

The project will, for the first time, enable some of the works from the collection of  Ravilious Newhaven paintings to sit within the spaces they depict, such as the sea view from the Sussex Coast as well responding to the industry in the area. 

There will be also a full programme of associated events running alongside the trail, including a display of the four paintings in the Ravilious Library at Towner Eastbourne, and artistic responses to the Ravilious paintings by pupils from Newhaven’s Seahaven Academy school.

‘Following Ravilious - Newhaven Views’ is part of the BN9 programme of events and arts activities funded by the Newhaven Enterprise Zone and delivered by Towner Eastbourne in collaboration with Creative Newhaven, with the generous support of Newhaven Enterprise Zone, Boutique Modern, Prismaflex, and King & McGaw.