Events
By way of Beachy Head: Re-telling Sussex sites in drawing, poetry and music
Image credit: Stuart Robinson
Ed Hughes, Hope Wolf and Andrea Haslanger will share their original approaches to retelling the Seven Sisters, South Downs and Beachy Head, iconic and beloved Sussex sites which are also the subject of fantasy, debate and difficulty. 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 – was recorded as Distant Voices, New Worlds, voted the Guardian’s ‘contemporary music album of the month’ in November 2024, reviewed as ‘English to its core’ yet defying tradition. The Songbook was performed at Towner Gallery in July 2025 – a sold-out concert which celebrated the work of local teenage creatives alongside nationally-renowned artists. Rifted Shores, also hosted at Towner Gallery, was a drawing workshop led by Catherine Anyango Grünewald, an internationally exhibited artist who has created adaptions of literary texts, translated into multiple languages. Directed by Dr Hope Wolf and Dr Andrea Haslanger, this was woven through with expert insight into the remarkable 1807 poem about Beachy Head by Charlotte Smith and analysis of the fluid arts of Sussex, drawing on Wolf’s major exhibition and book Sussex Modernism and Haslanger’s work on the literary and philosophical debates around peace that flourished in Britain from 1700-1815.
Reflecting multiple heritages and inclusive approaches to local places, the speakers will show us different, refreshing and fascinating ways to go ‘by Beachy Head’. They will at the same time demonstrate inspiring examples of practice-based research and partnership development, useful for anyone seeking to develop publicly facing research.
This event is a Sussex Retold event organised in partnership with the University of Sussex with funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Impact Acceleration Account (IAA).
About the speakers:
Ed Hughes's music ranges from solo to large-scale compositions including orchestra, stage and silent screen. Described as 'enchanting...elaborate and strange, but incontrovertibly English' (Richard Hanlon), commissions have come from The Opera Group, London Sinfonietta, I Fagiolini, Mahogany Opera, Glyndebourne/Photoworks, Brighton Festival and others. His opera States of Innocence premiered at Brighton Festival 2024 starring Sir John Tomlinson. Ed Hughes is Professor of Composition at the University of Sussex.
Andrea Haslanger is an Associate Professor in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Sussex. She is currently writing a book titled Impossible Peace: Imagining Life After War in the Long Eighteenth Century.
https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p349546-andrea-haslanger
Hope Wolf is an Associate Professor in Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Sussex. She is curator of the Towner exhibition Sussex Modernism, and author of a book of the same name published by Yale University Press in April 2025.
https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p371993-hope-wolf