Exhibition
ARCADIA - Circle Gallery
For the past decade, Danny Pockets' work has focused on the everyday icons and touchstones of our lives that risk being swept away in a tide of 'regeneration', pubs, chip shops, café's, venues, small independent business'. The cornerstones of our communities negated by a tsunami of superstores and metro convenience.
Four years ago he started on a series of drawings, paintings, films and sound recordings of the pier at Hastings White Rock. Having noticed various landmarks, remnants of the Seaside Towns heyday, disappearing all along the coast. He feared for the future of the mighty structure and began to record it lest it be lost to progress, or inertia, or both.
Until winning the Jerwood South Coast Prize to launch the new Circle Gallery at The South Coast College, Pockets' hadn't found a suitable space to show the work.
The result is Arcadia, the culmination of a four year meditation on the historical and social importance of buildings / structures / social gathering places such as the English Seaside Pier.
The exhibition explores the social architecture of the mighty structure as well as the physical. That beautiful testament to our connection with the elements that reaches out to the horizon and allows us a moment of freedom from terra firma. A place of momentary freedom, laden heavy with the weight of our aspirations, our loves and losses, our spirit as a people.
Working from the series of drawings, sketches and paintings gathered over that four year period and using materials relevant to location, both historically and in the present, Pockets has transformed the Circle Gallery into a tribute to Eugenius Birch's mighty structure and the glory and melancholy of the English seaside experience...
