ARTISTS TALKING

This particular area of housing had been earmarked for regeneration and many of the occupants were being moved out in preparation.

1066 Housing Association and Hastings Borough Council had devised a scheme whereby local artists could use empty flats in return for contributing to the life of the local community. Currently there are artists making films, site-specific installations, photography and working with different community groups alongside students studying architecture and spatial design and a resident public artist. As part of the Coastal Currents Arts Festival, which ran through September in Hastings, Rye and Bexhill on Sea, all the artists in the Ore Valley opened their spaces or staged their work over one weekend.

Initially I had applied to take on the flat with no real idea about how I would use the space although my previous work had been based on human interventions in the urban environment and responses to the traces and debris of human lives etched on the area. However, when I walked in the door I began to see the rooms once lived in by so many residents as a series of voids and planes that could be the basis for new work. I felt that the actual walls, floors and ceiling were like blank canvases waiting to reveal themselves in a kind of archaeological dig.

Over several months I considered the space in terms of adding to it to create a site-specific piece, but then began peeling squares of wallpaper here and there and photographing the streets and houses nearby. I searched for evidence of previous occupation and found little in this 1960s prefabricated flat. After about six months I began to see that the space could be more readily seen by cutting into it, and began to cut a series of holes in the walls at eye level. I aimed to create a kind of running stitch from space. Initially there was a great deal of dust and mess but the clean openings, broken by the wooden sections of stud partitions, were pleasing and made the flat seem even smaller. I also began to find traces of transformation and the presence of previous occupants – a trace of orange striped wallpaper on an outside wall was an exciting discovery as was a yellowy geometrical patterned paper uncovered when cutting into the outer wall of a cupboard.

During the year, I have tried to record the process of emptying out properties and tracing the residues of how people make a place home using both film and photography. It became evident that the people who still live here either love it, and tend to have created their own communities; or they appear ghost like and barely assembled, almost dissolving into the bricks and mortar. From the size of rooms, to the size of the flats and the proximity of one flat to another and one block to another there is a strong feeling of being tightly contained, of an airless density. To build more houses in the lungs of the green Ore Valley feels intrusive.

It is not clear when the process of regeneration will start in Farley Bank and so I continue to use the flat for ongoing experiments in space. I am currently making a ‘white out’ reflective room using acetate and natural light.

Neville Gabie recently gave a presentation to the artists, local councillors and workers involved about how a similar project in Liverpool had developed. Although the circumstances of support and levels of experience are different there was much to learn from his ‘further up in the air’ projects. Some of us are now on the Ore Valley Forum representing artists and art projects and planning how the future of the arts in Ore Valley might develop.

sharonhaward@hotmail.com