Culture

Blending live performance with responsive virtual reality, this new one-woman show unfolds in a fully digital environment that shifts in real time with the performer’s movement and emotional state.

Craig Mason almost ‘broke the internet’ with his fake bamboo and he gave the dogs at Battersea a pop-art inspired room that was fit for a King Charles Spaniel, but it was his pub in Edinburgh that had Interior Design Masters on BBC1 sending him back to us in Hastings. Most definitely their loss, our gain I say!

Two years ago, Ibi Meier-Oruitemeka (Studio IMO) was not a painter. In fact, she had never really considered it as an option. But on the morning of her birthday in May 2023, she woke up with the inexplicable urge to buy some paint. She followed that feeling, and since then, painting has become not just an artistic pursuit but a radical shift in the way she sees herself.

Beccy McCray will be no stranger to those working in Hastings and St Leonards’ art scene, local environmental activism, or simply out and about around the place. Keen-eyed Get Hastings readers may even remember her from Louise Coulthard’s 2023 piece on allotments. Working across multiple disciplines, blending visual storytelling with the natural world and social themes, her disparate interests coalesce into a wild creative practice that sees Beccy grace this issue’s cover sho

Katja has lived in Hastings for many years and runs the incredible Katja’s Cakes from her studio at The Yard. We caught up with her (and the very gorgeous Staffordshire Bull Terrier Roxy) to eat cake and chat baking, ceramics, creative inspiration and Yard life!

This hugely innovative and creative film focuses on the neurodivergent experience and has its feet firmly planted in Hastings. Gareth Stevens explains why he thinks it is not so much about autism, it is of autism.

A childhood passion for fixing things led Prince Tino to build a business that’s helped tens of thousands of South African children become computer literate. Now living in Hastings, he says his mission is far from finished.

Molly Hawkins, an award-winning designer, artist, and muralist known for her vibrant murals and playful public artworks, has announced a special artistic takeover this Spring. From April 8th to 13th, the Introduced pop-up space will be completely transformed into Molly’s creative world, filled with collages, shapes, and patterns that spark joy and positivity.

Red, Blue, Up is a major new exhibition of paintings and drawings by Bexhill-based artist, Michelle Roberts. It features a wide selection of Roberts’ works from the last 15 years. Through this detailed yet joyful execution, her works are underpinned by her unwavering precision and control, as she dissects shapes, forms and patterns across canvas and paper.

Now, if I wrote down RX to the good people of Hastings, they might very well think-ah yes, the fishing boats, and their Rye registration. But what if we flipped those letters around and it was XR? The Winter edition’s seasonal cover was by tech-artist Ornagh Lynch, convert and champion of all things Extended Reality.

Mardi-Gras, Carnevale, Pancake-Day… wherever you are or whatever you call it… in the Christian tradition it’s a day to consume all your treats and celebrate before midnight, because from tomorrow (Ash Wednesday) you’ve got to be on your best behaviour until Easter Sunday

As my lemon and ginger tea cools on the table beside me and my interviewees get situated, I look around the space. I’d never been inside Afri-Co-Lab before, and it’s so much more than I’d imagined.

If you’re local to the Hastings area and you haven’t heard of Brook Tate yet, do you even have ears? Whether he is painting, writing, teaching maths, singing or dancing, Brook Tate is a force to be reckoned with: an insanely talented creative and proud human being with the courage to be vulnerable in front of audiences, as well as being unapologetically himself

How our film about the occult side of Hastings told us what it wanted to be about, and we just did what we were told…

It’s the Wednesday morning following Jack in the Green and everyone is exhausted due to five days without water – and what does any sensible Hastinger drink when there’s no water? Beer!

No doubt it seemed like a great idea at the time. But the best-laid acid house plans and all that… On May 6, Marky Souter left his home in Cornwall at 5am to catch an early morning flight out of Newquay to Gatwick. From there, he took the train to Hastings

‘To keep balance, you must keep moving’. It’s Einstein’s words that Maria McErlane quotes in her recent memoir Bumps in the Road, and which are particularly apt for this woman whizzing about our town.

Deep-rooted in traditional 18th-century celebrations to ring in the beginning of summer, Hastings’ Jack in the Green is much like any other folk festival held in the UK, of which there are many, and yet so often people appear confused, bemused, and stare at me wide-eyed and agog when I explain a typical May bank holiday weekend in our fair town.

At one of the most prestigious buildings on the South Coast is the work of one of the South Coast’s most prestigious painters. In the first floor gallery of the De La Warr Pavilion, Hastings resident and acclaimed British painter, Laetitia Yhap’s exhibition entitled ‘An Ending to a Beginning’, features intricate paintings of fishermen on The Stade Beach in Hastings Old Town.

Meet the new wave of Young Music Promotors on the South Coast. After some turbulent and stormy years for hospitality everywhere, Hastings is fortunate that a new wave of young promoter blood is washing onto the south coast shores