LAUREN GODFREY: GROUP HAT at De La Warr Pavilion 15 June - 15 September 2019

LAUREN GODFREY: GROUP HAT

Opening 15 June

Until Sunday 15 September

First floor gallery at the De La Warr Pavilion

Throughout the summer, artist Lauren Godfrey will transform the De La Warr Pavilion's first floor gallery into a space for learning and unlearning.

The exhibition will be her response to her impression of the De La Warr Pavilion and the town of Bexhill as a ‘porous chorus’ of individuals and groups: buildings, pieces of furniture, steps and surfaces that together form a whole.

A new series of moveable artworks, furniture, objects and a mural inspired by encounters with the Pavilion’s employees and groups she has worked with will create a setting for play, reading, listening and reflection.

Many of the works in Group Hat have been developed in close relationship with several local organisations. Some built components of the exhibition will be donated to The Pelham community hub in Sidley. This centre is used by a number of different community groups, including New Thing Academy, a dance school with which Godfrey has worked to explore how knowledge is performed through movement. The artist has also run a series of workshops with Chantry Community Primary School in Bexhill to make shapes, patterns and words that will recur throughout the design of the furniture and mural. Hastings & Rother Furniture Service has generously loaned Godfrey a trolley that she will ‘upcycle’ for the exhibition, turning it into a book-swap-on-wheels, and which will be returned to the charity for them to continue cataloguing donations in September. Finally, Godfrey will produce a manual of shared Bexhillian knowledge, drawn from conversations with children from Chantry Community Primary School, DLWP staff, volunteers and gallery visitors, that shares ‘how-to’ guides of the different things we each know how to do.

2019 marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus, the influential German art school that pioneered the idea of ‘thinking through making’ and the close marriage of art, design and functionality. Group Hatcelebrates and builds on Bauhaus forms of radical education, including learning in a way that is non-hierarchical, and that puts play and process at its heart.

Find more info here