21 – 27 November 2016
The Crypt, St Mary in the Castle, Pelham Place, Hastings TN34 3AF
Open daily 10 – 6
Preview 20 November 6 – 8pm
Ian Land | Alexander Brattell | Chris Wainwright
Ian Land – Blood Lake
Senlac Hill, the presumed site of the 1066 Battle of Hastings, has long been a resonant place. A fairly anonymous field, rising at one edge to a ridge, on which now stands Battle Abbey, built by the victorious William as a symbol of his victory over Harold. Even the etymology of the name Senlac is impossible to untangle without reference to the battle. Senlac means ‘Sand Lake’ in Old English. This translates to ‘Sanguelac’ in Norman French, which in turn translates back into English as ‘Blood Lake’. Never has a field been so appropriately named.
I decided to revisit Senlac, and other sites important to the battle, to photograph how they appear today. I combined some of the pictures with contemporary and near-contemporary accounts of the events of that day, in an attempt to construct a psychogeography of
the battle.
Website
Alexander Brattell – Still Point. Prints 2016
“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”
T.S. Eliot. Burnt Norton. 1936.
Website
Chris Wainwright – Dark Matter
A selection of recent work from sites of energy, past, present and future. They range from observing the natural power of the high arctic region threatened by the world’s escalating levels of energy production, to the equally enigmatic, inaccessible, European Centre for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland. Sitting between these opposites is coal, traditional and unsustainable in the long term but with significant implications for the communities that have depended upon it.
Whilst deep below the ice and water of the arctic we plunder the earth’s natural resources, the obscure and obsessive work by an army of scientists at CERN continues to flourish, whilst Kellingley Colliery in Yorkshire, the last deep coal mine in Britain, closed on 18 December 2015, the date I made the images there in this series.