The challenges of working in creative collaboration………
Our ‘how’ appeared like a bolt from the blue. Six disparate artists from across the spectrum of multi-disciplinery practice, sitting, talking, standing and gesticulating in fervent exploration, seeking the one thing that would unite our project. We needed to find something which spoke of the industry and life of Hastings in times past, we needed to speak of the development of The Stade area as well as the age-old conflict between the fishing community and the middle classes. We needed to embrace the conflict, encircle the controversial Jerwood Gallery with all its chattering classes connutations while remaining true to our seaside community.
One word. That word was SALT. It came into my mind like a bolt from the heavens. It came because I didn’t have enough money to get a taxi home from the station on a fierce stormy night and when I finally got home, battered by the elements, I realised I was coated in a thin veneer of sodium chloride. The elixir of life, the essential mineral for survival, the preserver of fish and the fishing industry, the stuff of the sea – the conceptual heart of our community.
We had it. And once we had it, it grew into a wild idea that seemed at once implausible and utterly right. Leigh Dyer brought out his drawing of a huge life-size industrial conveyor belt which we fell upon like excited children. Peter Quinnell then came in with a better drawing, showing the OHPs slung carelessly with ropes and pulleys from the ceiling. Miranda Sharp, our Peoples’ Secretary of Hastings showed us the words gathered lovingly from the people of Hastings and Xaverine Bates pulled out photographs of salt mountains, salt hills, salt piles which resonated – and SALT was born……
Working with other artists on a single project is always a daunting prospect. How will the intentions and skills of each individual maker conform into the mesh needed to create a ‘something’ which is of equal ownership?
How do the artists physically work together as part of a wider process and how do they make the kinds of critical decisions that gestate a work with intention and integrity?
With these questions in mind I embarked on a project with five artists, each of whom works entirely differently and who engages with differing audiences.
To add to the possible confusion, one of the artists lived far, far away in Cardiff and she would not be physically able to get to the space until the week before the opening night.
So it was with trepidation on all our parts that we embarked on the residency which marked the finale of the Coastal Currents Festival in Hastings Old Town.
Together we were Xaverine Bates, Miranda Sharp, Leigh Dyer, Peter Quinnell, Kelly Best and me. Kelly lives in Wales so the first two meetings were held without her in the Stade Hall which would house our work for the Last Night of the Prom event.
For hours we batted about ideas in a kind of playful, free-form dialogue. Very quickly though themes appeared and settled into the debate – we knew we wanted to suspend things from the massive roof of the internal space. We also knew we wanted to make one big ‘thing’ together rather than lots of smaller things apart. And we knew that we felt bad that Kelly wasn’t with us in case she felt left out of the brainstorming.
Over the next few weeks we sent reams of emails between each other. Furious debates over materials and the context of the show.
Our brief was to make something about the development of the Stade area in Hastings which has been used traditionally by the fishing community, as a coach park and nowadays as the site for a community gallery space, a stone’s throw from the new controversial Jerwood Gallery building. We knew whatever we did, we would have to embrace the controversy and the historical conflict between the fishermen and the town folk. It was just a case of working out how.
