I didn’t exhaust the possibilities for seeing art in this year’s Brighton Festival. But I was glad to have caught both the exhibitons here. If you saw either, let me know in the comments!
Tender Exchange
Hold a wooden heart and privately speak into it. Speak what is in your own flesh and blood heart. The wooden heart is anatomical in shape. Your own metaphorical heart impossible to locate. This exercise proves challenging. “It’s hard to say what’s really in your heart” I say to a project facilitator. “Yes, and it’s hard to know where to stop,” she replies, I take the trinket to a nearby tree and as I stand below, in presumable communion with nature, I commit a few words to a discrete inlaid microphone. Then I return the heart.
The artist took it from me and placed it on a dock on a plinth where my innermost thoughts joined a sea of voices which echo from some dozen of these recording devices. I think my exact words were something-something-grateful, something-something-hoped for. As such, it was a generic, if ostensibly heartfelt, message. But on my way home I thought of many things I could have, should have, said to do justice to this quite twee but well-executed art work. Twee is not a dirty word, btw, if like me you grew up to the sound of 1980s tweepop.
I moved around the ring listening to voices drift in and out of ear shot. Here was where prayers, wishes, confessions, confidences and secrets were exchanged and where the contents of your heart were offered up as tender in multiple senses. Currency for what I do not know. But to speak your innermost desires to an archive and hear them carried off by the breeze in this way was to feel like letting go.
Do my spoken feelings register with the universe or have I divested myself of them forever? Only time will tell. Tender Exchange now has knowledge of some of my intimate feelings, but reading news headlines later that day, I realised, we know very little about the human heart.
Tender Exchange was at Moulescoomb Place on May 16-17 2026. It was a Brighton Festival event by Becca Gill of Radical Ritual.
Shadow Light: Songs My Brother Taught Me
I had never seen a white cube as white as the Project Space at Phoenix looked during the recent show by Simon David Eden. And as the artist floated towards me, dressed in white, with a scarf you might wear to an ashram, he took on an inescapable aspect of celestial guardianship.
Shadow Light: Songs My Brother Taught Me is a show about suicide, both its acceptance and its prevention. It pays tribute to the artist’s elder brother, who sadly took his life in 1976, at the age of 20. The musical siblings had played guitar together. And their old acoustic, painted white, strings all broken, lies in a hardshell case loosely wrapped in rusted chains; it’s as if the instrument has emerged in this hallowed space, Houdini-like by its own volition.
The life of this guitar extends to a suite of photographic prints, monochrome with the occasional dangerous red accent; the prints cluster upon all four walls accumulating ‘sold’ dots. If the public clearly wants them up on their walls, these serenely cubist studies (surely the eponymous songs inherited from Eden’s older brother) bear the weight of memory and silence. It’s a silence that not even the murmured conversations here can dispel.
I too enjoy one of these low register chats with the artist. He tells me that the park outside (known in Brighton as The Level) was where his brother once worked as a groundsman. It’s a fact reflected in the two sculptural elements of the exhibition: as dried leaves, elm stumps, Sussex flint, which is as black and white as the prints, and a vicious looking saw blade. And because the artist’s late brother burnt his diaries, lyrics and notebooks, some ashy remains of bound paper are here in a readymade cage.
Eden directs me to a poem on the wall in a quite priestly way and leaves me alone with it. In this poem the facts alone sing, in a concrete form text in which these lines stretch out and loosen as the white page behind them absorbs the pain like a healing hand pressed to a brow. I was moved, with a sadness hard to bear in close quarters. The artist did also say he felt his brother’s presence in the gallery. He has been brought back to us: a resonant gift for anyone who has known the loss of someone to suicide.
Shadow Light: Songs My Brother Taught Me was at Phoenix Art Space between May 1 and 17 2026
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