The edge of land has always attracted us humans. Whether that’s the soft-underfoot sand of a relaxing day at the beach or the sudden and violent moment land becomes cliff becomes sea, it is a boundary that draws us. It is also a place entwined with politics, especially so currently in the UK as racists watch the coast for dinghies in a desperate attempt to stop outsiders from elsewhere coming onto the land.

A new exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, suitably a gallery literally constructed on the beach, seeks to explore through culture the conditions of that landscape moment when earth becomes water. An OS map might use a solid line to demark the waterline, but it’s far more nuanced, rich, and complicated than such a binary construct. Edge: Where the Land Meets the Sea is a show of works by 33 artists that seeks to start a cultural discussion around that nuance.





It is a co-curation with The Land Gardeners, who last year organised SOIL: The World at Our Feet, looking at the microbial and nourishing value of earth through art at Somerset House, London. This project is a continuation of that curatorial research into our understanding of what is beneath our feet, whether walking or swimming. As Edge continues from Soil, so too will a Hastings Contemporary project next yearplace continue from here – Horizon, next September, will look at the diffusion between sea and sky.

Here, however, we are firmly on terra firma, though that solid idea of land is loosened through creative testing of binary edge conditions. It begins with a gallery-filling woven tapestry by Otobong Nkanga, setting out the stall for this being a show that despite an English south coast location is not tackling the subject with provincial intent. Over 21 square metres, the Nigerian-Belgian artist’s abstracted work is an amalgam of energy, earth, the cycle of life, and regeneration. It sets the scene for ideas and approaches which follow through the varying series of spaces the HAT Projects-designed gallery offers.

Facing Nkanga’s enormous tapestry are elements at the other end of the spectrum. Five images by biologist France Bourély explode to human scale microbial creatures and territories, immediately pulling the visitor outside of a human worldview at scale with a jolt as sudden as the tapestry reminded us that this spatial and geological subject was to be explored in the creative abstract.




There is room for the very real actuality of the shoreline however. A 2024 film from land artist Andy Goldsworthy sees him find a body-shaped space on the Maine coastline, conceal himself within seaweed and allow the tide to consume him. For Goldsworthy, humanity is just another part of nature – sure, humans may have awareness, criticality, and art, but at base our existence is just a late-stage of the same slow-life that are rocks, shells, and microbes that are fuelled by the conditions of land meeting sea.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ 2002 image End of Land I, features a lady prostrate at an English cliff’s edge, staring down over white cliffs into the vertiginous depths. It is a powerful image of the abrupt moment of security ending – perhaps made more so when considering it ten years on from German-born British-resident artist Tillman’s anti-Brexit images featuring the English coast and slogan No Man is an Island.

Maggi Hambling, long influenced by the same turning waves of the Suffolk coast that spoke to Benjamin Britten, is represented by Wall of Water XXXII (2024), from a long-running series of works that speak to memory, death, and the range from solid to vapour that the coast is.




The threshold between land and sea, between human and nature, is also articulated in a well-curated arrangement comprising Cedric Morris’ Landscape of Shame (c.1960) and two Mike Perry works. Morris’ oil painting documents dead birds found in fields as a result of pesticide contaminated seeds, while Perry’s diptych of c-type photographic print and found-material sculpture – the photo is of a hay field drenched in glyphosate, designed to kill weeds and running off into the water table, while a congealed lump of molten plastic, formed when plastic is subjected to extreme heat such as a forest fire, was found on a Pembrokeshire beach and relocated here as an anthropogenic sculpture.

At moments, the curatorial framework loosens when it perhaps should tighten into examining conditions more closely. David Nash’s Wooden Boulder (1978-2003) is included, a slow project in which a huge carbed timber lump dislodged from the Welsh mountainside, rolled into the river Dwyryd, and – over 35 years – found its future in the estuary then Atlantic. It’s a seminal work of British land art and is deeply poetic in the way it considers ageing, process, decay, loss, and rebirth. Here, however, presented through four charcoal drawings plotting its path, it seems a distraction, taking the viewer into an extrapolated and enormous framing of Edge, one which seems to encompass all of time and space.




Similarly, Anya Gallaccio’s Days that cannot bring you near (2005/2026), a grid of clods of earth from a local farm that will decay and crumble over the exhibition’s duration, is poetic and sits well in the gallery, but is more connected to Soil than Edge and feels a little forced into this curation.

That said, Edge seems comfortable in being a broad-brush reading of the complex interstitial space where sea laps at land, both considering the threshold boundary literally and in detail as well as a metaphor for broader ideas and inferences. There is a great deal squeezed into Hastings Contemporary by the Land Gardeners with co-curators Henrietta Courtauld and Bridget Elworthy, but it does not feel crowded. Rather, it feels a spacious show that allows ideas to flow in and out, washing, eroding, reforming, and growing.