Nathan Coley’s Illuminated Sculpture, ‘You Imagine What you Desire’ in St Nicholas’s, ‘the mother church of Brighton’
A few weeks ago I headed to Brighton to cover the opening of HOUSE and the Brighton Festival for the Learned Pig. You can read the article on the Learned Pig here: http://www.thelearnedpig.org/edge-and-shift-brighton-festival-and-house/2403 And below are some extracts along with a kind of photo-journal.
Nathan Coley’s ‘Parade Sculptures’ in The Regency Townhouse
“We’re here at the University of Brighton Gallery on a tour of the Brighton Gallery and HOUSE commissions listening as Varda describes the piece as her “hymn to coloured-plastic”. Entitled Beaches, Beaches, it’s a celebration of the life of summer and all of the colours it proposes. A ludic homage to the bright paraphernalia of the “beach spectacle”, Varda’s installation resembles a half-remembered dream of some now-distant trip to the beach, giddily recalled as a hot explosion of colour and Vitamin D.”
Rachel Kneebone’s sensual porcelain sculptures and texts
“A relict is “a surviving remnant of a natural phenomenon” and in Brighton and Sussex it’s found in abundance on the coastline in the pebble-dash piled up by the tides. As the voices of the workmen in Loomes’s video tell us: “the aggregate that we dredge up is quite often the end of a riverbed from the ice age. The aggregate won’t have seen the light of day for millions of years, one hundred and fifty million years or more.”
Souvenirs – Brighton Rock
“Coley’s reflections on the “politics, people and place” of Brighton, which is, in his own words, a “nowhere made somewhere through an act of terrorism”, might make us wonder if the Brighton bombing isn’t the most pervasive “relict material” to survive in this seafront community.”
The Pilgrimages 