This September, artist Sophie Barber opens her show, Mackerel sky, mackerel sky, never long wet, never long dry at Hastings Contemporary. Like many great stories, this is a journey that starts here, travels the world, sort of, and returns home triumphant. Born in 1996, it has taken less than thirty years to have a museum show of international importance in the town of her birth.

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

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.