A monumental head carved in stone by Jacob Epstein (1910) shares a space with a seven-metre-long painting by Ivon Hitchens (1960) and a large wall hanging made with cellophane by Ethel Mairet’s Workshop (1940s). A magical woodland scene by surrealist Carlyle Brown (1948) appears alongside an Edward Burne-Jones tapestry (1886), a film by Neo-Naturist Jennifer Binnie (c. 1980), and a life-sized goddess by Alexi Marshall (2024).
Spanning from the late nineteenth century to the present, this exhibition features surprising juxtapositions and jostling perspectives. It traces artworks' varied, and sometimes conflicting, relationships to different modernist movements. It tells an original story about the ways in which art, cultures, and places outside of metropolitan centres have been seen.
Sussex is shown to be a place always, and ever, in flux. Dissident retreat is explored through the work of Virginia Woolf, Marion Milner and Grace Pailthorpe, dreamy seascapes by David Jones, marine visions by Edith Rimmington, Edward Wadsworth and Gluck, and contemporary sculptural installations by Becky Beasley. The show also ventures into the urban streets, seedy bars and rubbish dumps that frequent the countercultural art of Jeff Keen, Arnold Daghani and Edward Burra.
Places are reimagined through the eyes of different artists, both historic and contemporary. Pett Level inspired Epstein to conceive of a robot drilling into the rock (c. 1913). But it also provided a backdrop for David Bowie in the music video for Ashes to Ashes (1980), in which he wears a Pierrot clown costume, and featured more recently in a playful, postmodern painting (2020) by Sophie Barber (who also depicted rapper Kendrick Lamar leaving Camber Sands).
Famous figures appear alongside artists who had regional rather than national power; avant-garde artists who used 'provincial' as an insult are juxtaposed with those who supported 'new regionalism'; fine art is shown with counterculture and pop. This exhibition reveals that there is much to be learned from comparing how artists of very different kinds drew on the capacities of their locations to respond to the crises of their day.
The exhibition is curated by Dr Hope Wolf (University of Sussex) and based on Wolf’s book Sussex Modernism (Yale University Press, 2025).