Recent Sussex-related publications and releases.
If you like ROSA Magazine, you’ll also like Hope Wolf’s lavishly illustrated new book Sussex Modernism, published in May to coincide with the Wolf-curated exhibition of the same name at Towner Eastbourne this summer.
Wolf admits in the introduction that the book’s title is a little cheeky: there is no artist who could be defined as ‘a Sussex Modernist’ per se. Rather, she examines commonalities between a variety of influential artists who based themselves in Sussex (or were natives to it) in a period roughly spanning the 20th century. And she discusses what affect living in the county – rather than, say, the bustling metropolis of London – has had on their art.
She starts with Eric Gill and Jacob Epstein’s plan to create a ‘twentieth-century Stonehenge’ outside Lewes, and ends with the Binnie sisters’ Neo-Naturism in the 1980s. There are analyses of the Bloomsburys at Charleston and the Guild of St Joseph and St Dominic in Ditchling, of Edward Burra and Gluck, of Edward James and Lee Miller, of William Gear and Basil Spence, of Jeff Keen and David Bowie (who filmed the video for Ashes to Ashes on Pett Level beach near Hastings). And so many more, besides.
There are a lot of ‘isms’, as you might imagine, and Wolf coins a new one to nail her main point: ‘neo-regionalism’. Many different modern artists have benefitted from being based in Sussex for many different reasons; the validity of their art hasn’t been watered down by the provincial setting in which it was created, quite the opposite. There is no Sussex Modern ‘school’, then… only a common love for a very diverse, very stimulating region. Could any other county have produced such rich material? ‘Northampton Modernism’ would, surely, be a much slimmer tome.
Wild Basketry, by the Sussex-based basketmaker Ruby Taylor, is much more than just a ‘how to weave baskets’ book, though its second half is dedicated to just that. Taylor, who came to the craft after a difficult period in her life, writes about the psychological benefits of her work (‘slipping into the f low state’), how she’s developed a ‘caretaking, reciprocal relationship with nature’ (she forages all her materials, but is careful not to be greedy), and the history of basketmaking, which goes back at least 50,000 years (and probably much longer: because of the biodegradable nature of the end
product, any previous evidence has disappeared).
In April I was delighted to bump into Margy Kinmonth, who returned to Depot Cinema in Lewes to introduce the third of her trilogy of films about art and war, War Paint: Women at War. She was there a couple of years ago to do the same for her previous documentary Eric Ravilious, Drawn to War, which did extremely well at the box office for a film of its type. It looks like War Paint, now available to buy on DVD, has been similarly successful. The film, in Kinmonth’s words, shows women artists ‘not [as] passive objects amid chaos and brutality, but active observers and translators of war’s emotions and consequences.’ Kinmonth’s interviewees include Maggi Hambling, Rachel Whiteread, Jananne Al-Ani, Marcelle Hanselaar, Ami Bouhassane and the extraordinary Ukrainian conceptual artist Zhanna Kadyrova; other subjects include Lee Miller and Dame Laura Knight. It’s compelling, it’s insightful, and it’s intensely moving.
Finally another chance encounter, with the Sussex-based author Olivia Sprinkel at a fund-raising evening for Forests Without Frontiers in Brighton, alerted me to her new book To Hear the Trees Speak, which landed in the office a few days later. Sprinkel was working as a sustainability strategist in New York when she had an epiphany after reading about the decline of ancient baobab trees in Africa. She decided to abandon life in the city and embark on a five-continent trip, communing with ten different species of tree in nine different countries.
Her journey starts with a eulogy to birch trees in Finland and ends with her deepening Covid-lockdown relationship with a beech tree in a field outside Lewes, taking in Banyans in India, Bodhis in Sri Lanka, Eucalyptus in Australia, trees of the Amazon basin in Ecuador, Baruzeiros in Brazil, olives in the South of France, oaks in Sheffield, and Giant Sequoia in California. The book incorporates memoir, travel writing and bioregionalism, as Sprinkel tells us her peripatetic life story, while carrying her trusty 60-litre rucksack from one country to another, learning depressing statistics about the effects of globalism and climate change on trees, and enjoying uplifting experiences under the shelter of their branches.
Words by Dexter Lee