Jackie Hutchinson on Sussex Modernism at the Towner

The Vessel

Through a gap in the weather window, you are cutting chair covers for seated figures, or photographing the underside of the downs, or reconfiguring the 1930’s in your lime green dress.

You look to the narrow space between France and Britain, where the sea absorbs fantasies of refuge. Twisting to zero in the oceans eye, you thrive deliberately through the night, iron fenced into your deco chair, bracing the fever chill, reimagining the rigid shoreline, with its small complexities of turquoise rain, white salt, bewitched by the fluid Channel.

One day your outer self was clawed, but the community returned you to your safe space, beneath a cloudy cotton slip of sky, their hands a rare note of comfort by your patch of sea. You were not selling anything, there was no illicit business, you were just sitting. Casting your space age glow across the water.

The violators failed to unseat your patinated bronze self from the balcony of errors. 

A terrible silence and a listening air encircled your booted feet, the green paint shiny as a Christmas tang of light. Your dark body – in flight, over the markets and oceans of the world, where women gather their brittle fare.

J. Hutchinson ©2025

Tschabalala Self 'Seated'

NOTES:

This poem is about Tschabalala Self’s hand-crafted sculptural installation outside the De La Warr Pavillion in Bexhill, called ‘Seated’. It is black woman positioned looking out to sea. The

artist has said that she aims to 'defy the narrow spaces in which black female bodies are forced to exist.' The exaggerated body and facial features in the artwork allude to the racial and generational trauma of marginalisation and exclusion, but also to emancipatory joy and transcendence. It is not a directly modernist work, but is placed within a modernist building and has a surreal and contemporary appearance.

In May 2023 Self’s public sculpture was vandalised. The perpetrator covered the entirety of the woman’s skin with white spray-paint. The De La Warr responded amazingly, creating a restoration event providing people with gloves and tools, which was incredibly well attended by 300 people! And they restored the sculpture.

The artists thanked the restorers saying:

“Painting the skin of my sculpture white is an obscene act, and I feel horribly for individuals in Bexhill-on-Sea for whom this event may have shocked or frightened. To my supporters there, I would like to extend my sincere gratitude and a promise that I will continue to make work that provokes meaningful change and progress in our shared society.”

The Whale Tail, the Seashell, and the Heart

We walk across its flat roof, above the circular sign on the south side. The lido pier faded to blueprint, now that the groundwork is done. Marina Court stretches down to the East, toward our common interests and a world that binds us.

Up the spiral staircase, where Wadsworth’s mural is a dazzle camouflage of colour.

When storm Eunice sang through the Bow window, soared along the terraces and canopies, smashed the bandstand, and ruffled the collars of libraries, post offices, museums – what did we learn?

Do not dress your colonnade with flowers, instead place them lightly among the concrete and the steel. Weld the People’s Palace into modern culture, until the interior is truly music, until the alchemy of old leaves bridges the gap between classes, genders. And the building surrenders, so keenly, marking its arrival like clockwork.

We stop and watch the pendulous clump of orange sunlight strike its way around the glass.  It reminds us of the south bank with the river at its heart.

J. Hutchinson c2025

NOTES:

There’s a photograph in the exhibition of the De La Warr building by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy, which captures the surrounding older houses reflected in the modern glass

Named after the Earl De La Warr, Herbrand Sackville, the Pavilion, designed by Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff opened in Bexhill in 1935 & was originally conceived as the ‘People’s Palace’. It claimed to be the first major Modernist public building in Britain. Of the designers - one was a refugee from Hitler‘s Germany and the other was Russian. Originally, a statue called The Lost Goddess was meant to be placed outside the De La Warr – a Greek figure called Persephone, but following an outburst of opposition to the design and cost of the statue, it was permanently deferred.

On researching the building, I came across a curious quote by the writer George Bernard Shaw who, on hearing of the De La Warr Pavilion's opening said: “Delighted to hear that Bexhill has emerged from barbarism at last, but I shall not give it a clean bill of civilisation until all my plays are performed there once a year at least.”

Jackie Hutchinson