EASTBOURNE.- Five artworks created by artist Verity-Jane Keefe and commissioned by Towner Eastbourne, with support from the UK Government, are now unveiled in 5 locations across the public realm in the Eastbourne areas Shinewater and Langney.

The artist worked with 60 local school children, Shinewater and Langney residents, and a local Eastbourne foundry to create the artworks from objects extracted during archaeological digs and at Eastbourne’s recycling centre. The artworks can be found in walls by the shops on Pembury Road, on the side of Shinewater Sports Centre and on the ground in Langney Playing Fields, Shinewater Park and near Langney Shopping Centre. The locations were chosen by the artist, after observing the social gathering places and identifying gaps in the public realm – a former tree pit, a concrete footing of a long-removed bench, a concrete threshold into a playing field. The works have been installed into these gaps – the shapes left once the concrete and growth had been removed.

The Findings project began with archaeological digs in autumn 2023, where remnants of previous human activity were collected by participants of all ages. The objects were sorted and catalogued during workshops with Verity-Jane Keefe, archaeologist Jo Seaman, the Eastbourne Heritage Team and Towner in a retail unit in Langney Shopping Centre.

Participants used the objects as material in workshops that replicated processes that would be used in the production of the final works, like tile making, rubbing, casting and frame making. Some of the objects were then cast in brass at a local Eastbourne foundry, photographed in the hands of people involved in the project and digitally printed onto porcelain tiles. The works are now installed around the local area in walls or on the ground, tiled into frames in colours, taken from a palette developed by the artist of the local area.

Each work is accompanied by an interpretation panel, sharing information on the participant, the project and some poetic text by the artist, developed as part of the commission:

• Langney Playing Fields, Dave, Langney Shed
• Pembury Road Shops, Jo, Archaeologist
• Langney Shopping Centre, Tony, Two Happy Potters
• Shinewater Sports Centre, Jaad, Shinewater Primary School
• Shinewater Park, Julie, Two Happy Potters

Using the bronze age history of the area as a starting point, The Findings explores the value of the object and the everyday through modern archaeology and the public realm. Fragments and ruins are called upon to consider which ‘age’ we are living in now, what ‘public’ art is and how we make it via participatory processes.

“I’ve visited so many times now, collecting shapes, patterns and colours to form a ‘palette’ of sorts of this place. I started to connect the dots of invisible history across the area - a Bronze Age settlement now buried deep in a lake in Shinewater Park, with objects held in the British Museum, and at its centre, the 1970’s Langney Shopping Centre, modernised but with residue of its former self.

I’ve always thought that there is great power in the object. As talisman, token, treasure, rubbish, sculpture. When we were doing the digs, the archaeologist Jo said to me that archaeology is all just rubbish until we overlay interpretation on it.

I wanted to add another layer of process into the final artworks, casting some of the objects that had been found in a local foundry in Eastbourne, Collier Webb. This translation from the found to the semi precious might have been an endpoint in other works, with the cast objects as artworks in their own right, but in this case, I wanted to highlight them as something to be held by those that I’d worked with. I photographed those people, holding objects of their choice, which were then cut out as material, and collaged onto the Shinewater and Langney Sky. ” Verity-Jane Keefe