The Ragged Optimist 13
Worthing, Eastbourne, Margate, Ramsgate, Canterbury & more
It’s been a busy couple of weeks. There was First Friday at Marine Studios, and a UK general election, and I had a catch up with artist Melanie King (whose work I love), and I got to visit the Ramsgate studio of potter Mike Child (photos below). Then I loaded a van and headed south.
So last week started down in Worthing, where I was storing a couple of thousand books and a few hundred pieces of studio pottery at my dad’s house. I came back via Eastbourne.
And I’m writing this on Friday 12th (but we’re pretending it’s Monday, right?), a wet day in Ramsgate, and am planning to go to Margate this evening to watch Dodgy in the rain at Dreamland. What have you seen, and where have you been?
The Oldham Coliseum has been saved, just over a year after the council closed it. Well done Julie Hesmondhalgh & co. In Margate we have two recently closed-down theatres - incredible in a town that's doing so well. I hope our councillors look at Oldham for inspiration.
Artists are, apparently, working with archives, and finding overlooked stories. Who knew?
They have a full-size replica of a 1990s video store at the Immigration Museum in Melbourne. It's an installation by artist Callum Preston. It's not just the aesthetic of the video store that's interesting: it's the way they were a different model of exploring knowledge. Yes, there were posters for the blockbusters, but there was always the random find, the tape you stumbled across and took a chance on.
My friend Simone Sheridan shared this news - she’s a brilliant person, so check out what she’s up to. Anyway, here’s - appropriately - a video of Preston’s installation:
I’ve been emailing people I don’t know, to thank them for making things I’ve enjoyed - music, books, and this week, I emailed an artist to thank them for an art exhibition. On the way back from Worthing last week, I stopped off at the Towner in Eastbourne. Emma Stibbon’s exhibition Melting Ice Rising Tides is incredible, including a series of huge ink drawings of Sussex cliffs alongside a previous body of work about icebergs. The description doesn’t do it justice - go and see it.
And - if you’ve seen, read, heard something you like, find the person who made it and drop them an email. You might make somebody’s day.
Naomi Alexander is behind this brilliant piece of research into how artists lead co-creation. She has interviewed a bunch of artists, and created a podcast - in this episode I talk about listening. I was also in an episode of Mark Steel’s In Town about Margate recently. Hope you like the sound of my voice…
In the election, Ann Davies won in the new seat of Caerfyrddin, beating the former Conservative minister Simon Hart. On her way to Westminster, constituents sang as her train left the station. What a send-off! Thanks Philippa Cross for spotting this.
I’ve covered a bunch of rewilding stories in past editions of The Ragged Optimist. But is rewilding just nostalgia taken to its end point? In Nature's Ghosts, Sophie Yeo looks at the role of humans in the natural environment and argues it's not just about us removing ourselves to let nature get on with it.
Rewilding - leads to beaver news. Baby beavers in the middle of Canterbury.
AIDS drugs are proving incredibly effective. Cancer survival rates are up every year, and advancing rapidly. We're in a golden age of medicine.
The cancer story above is from my ally-in-optimism Sabra Lane, who hosts The Bright Side podcast. There's a really good discussion about the four day week in this episode.
I have recently worked for an arts organisation who define themselves by being busy and living on the edge of chaos. But as an outsider, the more I looked, the more I saw an unproductive work culture where nobody had any agency, and how that was impacting the mental health of staff, associate artists, and freelancers. Maybe arts organisations should be listening to the four day week debate.