Simon Tait gets a preview of some of the features of Brighton’s citywide
For four weekends through May Brighton, the city that seems destined to be the one seaside venue along the south east coast without a contemporary art gallery, will have its most comprehensive contemporary art festival.
The triumphant contradiction, part of the Brighton Festival this year, is the work of two members of Brighton’s huge artistic community, partners Judy Stevens, an illustrator and print-maker, and graphic designer Chris Lord.
Artists Open Houses began 29 years ago, and have become a template for similar schemes around the country, in which artists open their homes to show their own work and sometimes other artists’. There were 16 when they started, 240 this time welcoming over 1,000 artists, and something like a quarter of a million visitors are expected, and sales of art worth £1m.
But this year they have added House Gallery, piloted last year and now a fascinating range of backdrops for contemporary work. There is support for the double-ender from the Arts Council, Brighton Council, Visit Brighton and host of local business sponsors.
“It is effectively the visual arts element of the Brighton Festival, because there is no gallery” says Stevens, who began planning three years ago. “This is a long-standing community of thousands of artists, and with nowhere for the to show – though we have tried establish a gallery – this is a showcase for them. We’ve had a lot of help and advice from Nicola Coleby at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, and from Simon Martin at Pallant House in Chichester, and it’s been a great association.”
House is a fascinating innovation in which artists’ current work is seen in unexpected and even incongruous venues. Here are some of them.
The Regency Town House is a magnificent gentleman’s house of 1829 in one of Brighton’s most beautiful squares, and for a quarter for a century it has been the obsession of Nick Tyson to restore it as closely as possible to the way it looked in its mid-19th century heyday. It is in entering the final stages, but as the process continues, in the ground floor reception room is the work of 21 artists – picked from 80 submitted - who have taken the theme of regeneration. There is a particular complication for hanger Woodrow Kernohan – “because of the delicacy of the restoration, we aren’t able to hang on the walls, so we are having to invent new ways of exhibiting that show the art and don’t conceal the rooms wonderful detail, quite a challenge” he says.
Unravelling the Manor House is an exploration of the fascinating Preston Manor, home of the Thomas-Stanford family for 130 years, furnished to the family’s Edwardian taste, and said to be the most haunted house in Britain. Twelve artists and designer-makers have been commissioned to research the family and their home, and make interventions reflecting what they have discovered and also contemporary 21st century life. Mrs Ellen Thomas-Stanford, who came to live here in 1905, was an intriguing personality who met her second husband at the funeral of her first, and between then and her marriage had a child by her butler. She collected white Chinese porcelain figures, and in a show cabinet where they are displayed row-on-row ceramicist Matt Smith has interposed bright red china British bulldogs - made in the United States. Louise Batchelor has taken Charles Thomas-Stanford’s pipe case and made two glass pipes for it. Caitlin Heffernan has created a cloak for Ellen made entirely from peacock feathers. Laura Splan has made her a pair of gloves from gel that appear to be of human skin, complete with buttons.
House-Garden. Last year, the pilot year, Stevens and Lord created a seven-seat cinema in their front room. “We were told there were far too many seats” Stevens says “so this time the home cinema is in a garden shed, setting four at a squeeze”. At the bottom of the garden at 46 Buller Road four films are being shown over the month, and perhaps the most intriguing is Alice in Wonderland, made by Percy Stow in 1903 and the first ever film version of Carroll’s story. The actors are unknown, there were no film stars then, and it would have been seen in music halls and horse-drawn travelling cinemas. Twelve minutes long, it is complete and has been restored by the BFI, with the original colour tints recreated.
The Handmade House was a run down shambles of a farm building, built in 1939 in the delightful village of Ditchling when designer Ralph Levy saw it eight years ago, and moved in. The garden was a jungle, the house itself was a health trap with no facilities. “The only thing to do was to strip everything out to the basics and start again” he says. The original fittings and fixtures remaking as far as he could rescue them, everything else he has made himself, from the stove in the tiny lounge, to the kitchen fittings and even crockery. The garden is now reclaimed and neatly planted with vegetables by Levy and his neighbour Lucy Greenaway – an artist who is also director of Phoenix, the artists’ studio co-operative in Brighton – and where he has built a pizza oven (“I had a commission to design one, and the only way to do it is to build one”). He also has 60 acres beyond the house, and through part of this he has made a sculpture trail, because for House he is showing and selling the work of artist friends in the house.
