Audiosushi by Jeffrey Louis-Reed: Hastings Fishing Beach – Laetitia Yhap Exhibition Artist Laetitia Yhap has been living and working in Hastings for over 4O years. She started exhibiting her work in 1964 and during this period has produced an extraordinary body of work that documents the life and business of the famous Hastings fishing beach and fleet. With support from Hastings Borough Council, her large scale colourful and richly evocative art works are being brought back together and will be on show at their birthplace at the Stade, Rock a Nore, Hastings from 20 June 2015. The ‘All Hands: a Time Before Steel Boats, Tractors and Mobiles 1974-95’ exhibition reveals an important period for the artist that also coincided with major changes in the fishing industry from wooden boats to steel and major shifts in social order. Today it’s a different story of quotas and fish stocks, and of ecological and political challenges. Paul Joy Chairman of Hastings Fisherman’s Protection Society, who is captured in some of the works said: “Laetitia immersed herself in the industry for many years, she was accepted right from the beginning- if we were pulling out nets she would too and you could see the wind in the drawings.” ‘Fishing is a messy business; painting can glamorise reality and my struggle was to create an aesthetic which could express my real experience of daily life on the Stade’, commented Laetitia Caroline Collier, Director of Partnerships and Programmes at the Tate added of the exhibition: “These paintings are too robust and present only to be poignant. But there is a lament in them - for the passing of human and biological life, the intensity and necessity of keeping going, for the fragility and contingency of belonging, for the joy of love, friendship and purpose. From the perspective of now, in terms of the ecology and of individual destiny, we know that there are no longer plenty more fish in the sea. Seize the moment” The exhibition at The Stade Hall Hastings starts at the Midsummer Fish Festival on Saturday 20 June and will run daily, except Mondays until 05 July 2015