TRANSMISSIONS
or
The Psychoshadowery of John Logie Baird – Hastings Museum and Art Gallery
Artists: Geraldine Swayne & Jude Montague
Exhibition 11 January – 23 March Free – All Ages
Open Event Sat 11 Jan 4pm-6pm
Geraldine Swayne and Jude Montague explore the light and dark in the visions of John Logie Baird. Expanding his narrative out into the esoteric historical landscapes of Sussex, this adventure takes place through visual and audio transmissions with paintings and uses psychological dream tactics to follow his mechanical and electrical journey to the moon above us.
Film and study locations used for live performance including the follies of local philanthropist and slave-owner anti-abolitionist 'Mad Jack' Fuller particularly the sugarloaf building in Brightling, East Sussex. This building is a unique shape, modelled on the loaves of sugar for the sugar trade which financed his estate and it echoes a church spire. The pyramids of both Fuller's funerary monument and Decimus Burton draw on the traditions in Western magic of sacred geometry and site-specific visions.
Hastings has been a focus of technological activity and esoteric ideas for multiple generations. The town has been said to have occult layers of which the most famous is the presence of ceremonial magician Aleister Crowley who founded the religion if Thelema and is known for his dabbling in black magic. Inventors and writers drawn here include codebreaker Alan Turing. Baird who came to Hastings for his health and who developed his prototype of television here. The focus on the Hastings area transmits iterations of the inventive spirit back over multiple generations.
A highlight of the exhibition is a facsimile of letters concerning John Logie Baird's accidental self-electrocution in his development of mechanical-electrical transmission technology. The originals are in the Hastings Museum archive.
Curator Oli Rogers is a writer and artist with an interest in technology and esoterica.
Painter, audio artist and film-maker
Geraldine Swayne
Fine art printmaker, graphic novelist, writer, composer and broadcaster
Jude Montague
Email: judemontague@outlook.com
This is the first joint exhibition by Swayne and Montague. It follows a group exhibition 'Spirit of Invention' to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of John Logie Baird's development of television in Hastings (Electro Studios Project Space, May 2024) https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4n1yzvlk0xo
A local museum with a global collection.
Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, John's Place, Bohemia Rd, Hastings TN34 1ET
