Sussex Arts Prize winner starts to build Arcadia
Danny Pockets, winner of the Jerwood supported Sussex Coast College Sussex Arts Prize, is preparing to build his winning proposal 'Arcadia' - an installation using recycled objects, sound and film to create a structure that salutes what he describes as ‘the ‘strange majesty of the seaside pier at Hastings’. The piece will celebrate the Pier of yesterday, today and tomorrow - particularly poignant as since winning the prize Hastings Pier has been devastated by fire.
Pockets is an associate artist at The School Creative Centre, Rye and his winning proposal will explore the glory and vulnerability of the mighty structure that is Hastings Pier and its social and physical architecture.
Pockets describes the Pier as ‘a beautiful testament to our connection with the elements that reaches out to the horizon and allows us a moment’s freedom from terra firma’. After years of contemplating and making studies for a piece about the Pier, the prize has finally given him the space and backing to complete his meditation.
The installation is the first joint project between the Jerwood and the Circle Gallery - a three-dimensional drawing in wood, steel, light and sound that portrays the Pier as ‘a place of freedom heavy with the weight of our aspirations, loves and losses, memories, histories and our spirit as a people. The work will be testament to the awe inspiring architecture of the Pier, its current precarious condition and the fear of it being allowed to fall in to sea’.
Danny intends his work to be perceived as a 'tribute to' and not a 'requiem for' the historic landmark. Pockets’ work will be in the Circle Gallery Hastings from the 8th of November to the 3rd of December.
Further information about the exhibition can be found at www.sussexcoast.ac.uk