Rethinking Regional Arts, Crafts, Folklore and Music through participation, partnership and performance

The arts, crafts, music and folklore of Sussex speak to us about many people: land workers, townsfolk, farmers, shepherds, fishers, traders, migrants, makers, writers, story-tellers and singers. The Sussex Retold project explores ways to retell these stories from an inclusive perspective and reconsider where natural, cultural and regional heritages relate. Working with local cultural, council, and land organisations, we investigate how sounds, sites and stories can express how people have lived on and with the turf, chalk, cliffs and clouds of the region.

This project builds on a range of research projects across the University which explore the distinctive regional cultures of East and West Sussex and their local and global relationships. Through this, we hope to enhance local civic engagement and sustainable development in ways which benefit our partner organisations.

We will be working under three headings from 2024 to 2026: 

1. Diversifying Ditchling: Sharing new arts and crafts stories within and beyond the Guild

Ditchling Village and Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft showcases the artists and craftspeople who made Ditchling a creative hub in the 20th century, as well as contemporary practitioners whose work reverberates with their historic work. We are working with the museum to support its interests in community involvement, including through an oral history. This work draws specifically on Hope Wolf’s research and the oral historian is Sam Carroll. 

2. Storying Downland Cultural Heritage

We are working with local partners to explore the Downland landscape and cultural history of the South Downs in ways which reflect multiple heritages and inclusive regional and national identities. The South Downs Songbook - a music and composition project in schools and colleges - with composers Ed Hughes, Evelyn Ficarra, Rowland Sutherland and Shirley J. Thompson – is an inspiration. Its album Distant Voices, New Worlds was ‘contemporary music album of the month’ in November 2024, reviewed as ‘English to its core’ yet defying tradition. Hope Wolf’s work with Towner in Eastbourne including a major exhibition in 2025, and her research on cultural geographies such as Beachy Head, are also vital.

3. Composing sustainable landscapes in the South Coast through film, folk song and farming heritage.

This work brings together the interests of three partners: Sussex Traditions; Land Use Plus and Writing Our Legacy. The Sussex Traditions approach is described in Steve Roud’s assertion that “it is not the grand issues of life which worry us here – they can look after themselves – but the lives of the ordinary people which are often allowed to be forgotten” (“Who Cares About Tradition?”)

Land Use Plus as part of the Brighton & Hove Food Partnership (B&HFP), aims to cohere points of view of a wide range of people to create multiuse land which provides food, spaces, opportunity for education and greater connectivity, whilst protecting and restoring nature. It is working with farmers, the council, and others to improve food production practices that impact on climate change.

Writing Our Legacy/Changing Chalk

Changing Chalk is a National Trust led initiative that connects natural and cultural heritage to support Downland conservation. Changing Chalk has collaborated with Writing Our Legacy, a Brighton-based arts and heritage organisation, whose WOL Changing Chalk programme was commissioned to “engage the general public and writers, creatives and audiences from the Black, Asian and ethnically diverse communities, connecting them to the unique chalk grassland of the Sussex Downs and the communities of the urban coastal fringe of Brighton & Hove, Lewes and Eastbourne, through literature, creative writing, storytelling and other arts and cultural activity.” They have supported (with others) “We Hear You Now: A spoken word audio journey around the Seven Sisters and Sussex Heritage Coast” with the South Downs National Park’s Writer-in-Residence Alinah Azadeh.

This work draws upon Jolly’s knowledge and networks, including the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research’s conference Locating Women in the Folk, co-directed with Sussex Traditions, previous sponsorship of Writing Our Legacy writing workshops and the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme’s existing partnerships with Land Use Plus. Sam Carroll and Laura Hockenhull are also key to these activities.

Project people include:

Professor Margaretta Jolly: Principal Investigator

• Margaretta Jolly’s research on the theory and practice of life narrative and oral history supports the vision and application of this project in the context of a longstanding interest in Sussex folk heritages. She has explored these as methods for public and community engagement and as tools for enhancing and evaluating use and impact.

Dr Hope Wolf: Co-Investigator

• Hope Wolf’s extensive inquiry into the visual art and crafts cultures of Sussex forms a bedrock for the project. Wolf’s work focuses on place-making as vital determinants of identity and community, exploring how these dialectically support creative innovation. Especially significant is her challenge to conventional and pastoral stereotypes of Sussex culture.

 Dr Sam Carroll: Heritage Consultant and Project Manager

• Sam Carroll is an oral historian, project manager, learning facilitator, and community heritage consultant with twenty years’ experience across a diverse range of projects in both community heritage and academic research. She is director of Sweet Thames: The London Folk Club Heritage Project. Star Creative Heritage (National Lottery Heritage Fund), 2022 – 2023.

Professor Ed Hughes

• Ed Hughes’s work as a composer and researcher also underpins the project. Hughes’ compositions in and about the Sussex landscape and South Downs are springboards for thinking about the relationship between music, song, dance, environmental conservation and farming.

Dr Chris Sandom

• From the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme, Chris Sandom brings expertise in rewilding and land management. Within the SSRP’s South Coast Sustainability theme, he has worked specifically on the issues, visions and futures of the downland in Sussex and especially within the City Downland Estate, owned by Brighton & Hove City Council

Dr Perpetua Kirby

• Perpetua Kirby, also within the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme, draws on educational philosophy to hone a practical approach to urgent sustainability challenges, including with school children and those involved in farming and land-use. Her 2023 Open Press book, Creating with Uncertainty: sustainability educational resources for a changing world, edited with Rebecca Webb was produced collaboratively including with Jo Walton and Michael Jonik.

Dr Jo Walton

• Jo Walton works in climate communication, including through science fiction, serious games studies and other creative methods. With Chris Sandom, Perpetua Kirby and Dan Locke he has supported 24 Hours to Envision a Sustainable Future.

Dr Laura Kounine

• Laura Kounine specialises in the history of witchcraft and lore. She focuses on gender, emotions, selfhood, crime and conflict and early modern witch trials. She also explores methods involving historical self-narratives and oral history.

Dr Fiona Courage

• Fiona Courage, Director of the Mass Observation Archive, specialises in its uses in educational contexts, and also, as Deputy Director in the Library, will facilitate showcasing of heritage including the Copper Family papers in our Special Collections.

Professor Ben Rogaly

• Ben Rogaly has extensively researched community development and regional identities with a particular interest in how participatory oral history methods can illuminate the interests of migrant and minority peoples. He also exposes the racial capitalism involved in agricultural work.

 Others working at the University with relevant interests include

• Professor Alice Aldridge who researches local and global landscapes through ecoacoustics
• Dr Karis Petty who works on perception of the South Downs landscape for walkers who have impaired vision.
• Dr Jamie Barnes who explores ecological sensibilities and post-human perspectives including at Wakehurst Gardens.

 

Project events:

22 November 2024 – 28 April 2025: Scholars of Simplicity: Celebrating the Coppers with Sussex Traditions

We have been proud to launch an exhibition of the wonderful Copper family papers, Sussex’s celebrated folk singing dynasty, selected from the University’s Special Collections.

The exhibition, which continues until 22 April 2025, showcases the writings, arts and analyses of Bob Copper and a shepherding, land- working and singing history of Rottingdean and local Downland. We also celebrate the work of Sussex Traditions, a charity for heritage and music which aims to connect communities to their past, provide a fascinating learning resource, and encourage the development, nourishment and sustenance of the cultures of Sussex and its people into the future.

The launch included a welcome by the Deputy Director of the Library Fiona Courage, and Mike Tristram, Chair of Sussex Traditions and singing by the Coppers themselves.

This was followed by a lantern-lit singing walk up to The Swan pub, Falmer village, for more traditional music, song and dance with Laura Hockenhull, Ben Paley and Sam Carroll and the Scan Tester Fan Club.

This event and exhibition was supported by the University of Sussex Library, especially Kevin Bacon, Sean Goddard and Nadia Pattenden. 

_{Image: Horn Lantern © Bob Copper with kind permission of the Copper family}

 

Wednesday 30 October 2024: Whose South Downs? Creative and critical explorations of Sussex landscapes and seascapes with Writing Our Legacy

This listening and writing event explored the many heritages in local landscapes with artists, writers, countryside walkers and advocates from Writing Our Legacy, an arts and heritage organisation that enables Black, Asian and ethnically diverse people of colour to tell their stories through writing and the creative arts. We heard from Alinah Azadeh, Amy Zamarripa Solis, Sense Turner, Pauline Rutter, Georgina Parke and watched We Hear You Now, introducing an immersive soundwalk between Seaford and Eastbourne via the Seven Sisters and Cuckmere Haven. Some participants stayed for a creative walk on the campus’ boundary, using beautiful writing prompts provided by that project.

Liz Corkhill, Skills & Opportunities Producer from Towner Gallery reflected that

‘it was great to hear about the projects coming out of the Writing Our Legacy group and to think more deeply about our connectedness to the South Downs and to each other’.

The event was supported by Black@Sussex. We Hear You Now was supported by the South Downs National Park Authority and Arts Council England

3 September 2024: Regional Arts and Archives

In this session, we considered efforts to create regional archives of artistic and literary practice, or to contribute to regional archives. Hope Wolf discussed Sussex Modernism, a book and curatorial project which combines art and literature with regional cultural history, and which is set within the context of earlier initiatives, for instance at Towner, Eastbourne, to collect the artistic heritage of the region.

Margaretta Jolly discussed the Sussex Retold project, which builds a new archive of oral histories relating to Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft and interprets the records of local folksingers in the University Special Collections to reimagine the campus and its environs. Jeremy Noel-Tod introduced the British Archive for Contemporary Writing, and how this archive, which is based at UEA, might preserve and feed creative engagement with regional identity. We explored the political implications of the spatial labels we place upon objects (local, regional, international) and we are interested too in the relationship between place and hierarchical distinctions made between ‘art’ and ‘artefact’.

Harnessing Heritage: The role of heritage in regional identity, economic development and social wellbeing University of East Anglia

9 June 2018:  Locating Women in 'The Folk' – An interdisciplinary conference. Perspectives on women’s contributions to folk song, folklore, and cultural traditions. 9 June 2018, University of Sussex campus

Sussex Retold is supported by the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, the Sussex Centre for Modernist Studies and the South Coast Sustainability group within the Sussex Sustainability Research Programme.

We also acknowledge and thank our funder, the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA).