Sanctuary of Nature at the Stables Theatre & Arts Centre, Hastings

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A 1746 stable block that Hastings nearly knocked down

The Stables is exactly what its name says. The building is a stable block, built in 1746, standing at 1a High Street in Hastings Old Town.

In 1952 the council proposed to demolish it. That year the Old Hastings Preservation Society was formed specifically to save a number of endangered historic buildings, this one among them. With backing from the Georgian Society it was listed as a building of historic and architectural value — which stopped the bulldozers but left an obvious question: what is a listed eighteenth-century stable block actually for?

The answer arrived in March 1955, when Dick Perkins of the Hastings and District Theatre Guild saw that the shell could become a theatre. The Stables Trust Limited was formed to preserve the fabric of the building and convert it. It took four more years of what the theatre's own history calls monumental effort, and on Tuesday 16 June 1959 Sir Ralph Richardson opened it.

The art gallery came later. The bar and the Gwen Watford and art galleries were built in 1978, adding the entrance on The Bourne that visitors use today. Backstage areas followed in 2001, and the box office and auditorium seating were rebuilt in 2014. The Trust now owns the freehold outright.

Today it mounts ten of its own productions a year, hosts visiting companies and professional shows, keeps the gallery open all year round, and is a member of the Little Theatre Guild of Great Britain. It is a registered charity, number 211361, and it is run entirely by volunteers.

Why this is the right room for this particular photograph

I did not know any of that history when I submitted. I found it afterwards, and it reframed the whole thing for me.

Sanctuary of Nature is a photograph about refuge. It asks where people go when the world becomes unbearable, and it answers that the natural world offers shelter — not escape, but somewhere to breathe differently while everything else is frightening. It is a picture about the value of a safe place.

And it is now hanging inside a safe place that had to be fought for. A building erected to shelter horses, which local histories also record as having housed troops during the Napoleonic wars, served as a fire station, and at one point given temporary lodging to circus elephants. A building that was scheduled for demolition and survived because a handful of people in a small seaside town formed a society, argued its case, and then spent years finding it a purpose.

That is the part I keep turning over. Shelter is not something that simply exists. Somebody protects it, usually without much thanks, usually over a longer period than anyone expects. The leaves in my photograph are doing something the Old Hastings Preservation Society did in 1952 and volunteers at the Stables have been doing ever since.

It is a quieter reading of the work than the one I gave in Bradford, and I think it is just as true.

One photograph, three rooms, one summer

This has been a strange and instructive few months, because the same image has been on three walls at once.

In Hastings it sits in a community gallery in a converted stable block, in an open exhibition celebrating artists from across East Sussex, seen mostly by people who came for a play or a coffee and wandered in. In Bradford it hung at the Bradford African Festival of Arts, under the theme Nkosoo — advancement — among African artists, musicians and filmmakers, read as a statement about progress and where it starts. And it has been part of the summer programme at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, in the frame of a two-hundred-year-old artists' society.

Same file. Same print size. Three completely different pictures.

In Bradford it became political — a picture about what a person needs before they can move forward. In Hastings it becomes almost architectural, a picture about preservation, hanging in a case study of the thing it depicts. In Birmingham it is read as craft, sitting among painters and printmakers who will look first at how it was made.

None of those readings is wrong and I did not intend any of them. That is the lesson, and it took three simultaneous exhibitions for me to properly learn it: you make the photograph, and then the room finishes it. Where a picture hangs is not neutral packaging around the work. It is part of the work.

The photograph itself, briefly

The image is a human eye, close and alert, framed by wet green leaves with the water still sitting on them. The eye peers out. The leaves hold.

It came from the pandemic, though not only the pandemic — I was thinking about COVID-19, and before it Ebola, and the pattern of collective fear that has shaped so many lives across the two continents I call home. What I kept noticing was where people went. They walked. They sat in parks and gardens. They put their hands in soil. The natural world became the one thing that stayed indifferent to the virus, the news cycle and the borders closing around us, and there was something steadying in that indifference.

I have written the full story of the work twice already and I would rather point you there than repeat myself: the making of it and its first outing at Boomer Gallery is in my post on the Dreams and Nightmares exhibition, where it was selected alongside 200 artists from more than 2,000 submissions.

What an open-call exhibition actually gives an artist

It is worth being specific about this, because artists reading it may be wondering whether to bother, and the terms at the Stables are genuinely good.

• There is no fee to exhibit. A great many open calls charge £20 to £35 per submission with no guarantee of selection. This one does not charge at all.
• Commission is 35% on anything sold — at the lower end for a staffed gallery, and clearly stated up front rather than buried.
• The gallery covers insurance on exhibited works, CCTV security for the whole run, and the design and production of printed posters.
• It is staffed at all times and handles all sales through the front desk, including card payments. Nobody expects the artist to sit in the room.
• The run is two months, not a weekend — long enough that word of mouth can actually do something.

That list is the unglamorous infrastructure that lets a working artist show at all, and it exists because volunteers built it. The submission itself was one JPEG, a title, medium, dimensions and a price, emailed by the end of May. Roughly ten minutes of admin. Anyone hesitating over an open call because it feels presumptuous should weigh that against two months on a wall.

The same eye, whether it is a gallery wall or a wedding aisle

People still ask whether the fine art work and the wedding photography are two separate jobs. They are not. They are one practice under different conditions.

The attention that makes Sanctuary of Nature work — waiting for light to do the right thing, watching until the real moment arrives instead of manufacturing a false one, composing so that an image survives being looked at properly rather than scrolled past — is the same attention I take to a wedding in Leicester, London or Lagos. The fine art built that eye; the documentary work sharpened it, because nothing teaches you to find an image inside chaos like photographing people in situations you cannot control.

You make the photograph, and then the room finishes it — which is as true of a family's living room in thirty years as it is of a gallery in Hastings. That is the whole argument for taking a wedding as seriously as an exhibition print. You can see where the two halves meet in the Aworan collection, in this year's client galleries, and in the portrait work on the editorial shoot page.