Viva Brighton Issue #82 December 2019

William Nicholson, Judd’s Farm, 1912. Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne
ART
.............................
Brink
Caroline Lucas curates the Towner Collection
Caroline Lucas is a busy woman. Between
the frenetic goings-on in parliament in recent
months and preparing to defend her Brighton
Pavilion seat in this month’s snap general
election, she has found the time to curate an
exhibition at Eastbourne’s Towner Gallery.
Unsurprisingly, the resulting show is both
a celebration of the local landscape and a
campaigning platform, highlighting Caroline’s
concerns for the environment and climate
change. It runs alongside the retrospective of
David Nash, the prominent British sculptor
who works with wood, trees and landscape,
and whose exhibition title inspired Caroline’s
curatorial direction.
“It’s interesting that David’s exhibition is called
200 Seasons – it’s a retrospective of 50 years
of his work – and that got me thinking about
time,” explains Caroline. “200 seasons sounds
like an innocent enough title but – when you
project forward 200 seasons, instead of looking
back – what is our world going to look like?
Do we even know that we have 200 seasons in
which it will be possible to live safely on our
planet? Projecting 50 years forward is quite
scary in some ways.” Hence, the title of her
exhibition: Brink.
While selecting from the 5000 works in
....62....