Viva Brighton Issue #66 August 2018

SARAH EDMONDS
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The exhibition is highly interactive, with a few
gaps left for visitors to help fill. “When people
come through the door, they’re met with
half-tourist-information-centre, half-townplanning-meeting,”
Sarah explains. “They
can look around all the sights and landmarks
of the town – which are my paintings – and
there are lots of noticeboards and postcards
and prompts, for instance: ‘there’s a job
centre, make up a job for the noticeboard’.”
The suggestions are suitably imaginative…
“Rainbow taster. Smoothie hooverer. Jaguar
rider. Jacket potato chef.”
“The idea of a town is so universal,” says
Sarah. “You learn about towns and buildings
and buses and shops when you’re small, but
then you go on to move to different towns
as an adult, or even think about regeneration
and community, so people want to add
suggestions of what would make their ideal
place.” Previous Alphabetowns have included
dinosaur shops, tea houses, treehouses, and
“the best one: a question shop. A little girl
came in to the Worthing exhibition and sat
for about half an hour, drawing and furiously
writing, and she invented this amazing idea
where you go in one door, and you sit in the
lobby and you wait, and you have a healthy
snack, and then you think of your question.
And then you go up the stairs, all the way to
the top, and you tell the person
your question and they
give you an answer. And
then you go out through a
different exit.”
Alphabetown will be coming
to Brighton from the 15th to
the 23rd, and Sarah will be
running workshops throughout the week. So
what would you like to see in your ideal town?
Bring your best ideas. Rebecca Cunningham
sarahedmondsillustration.com
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