On the eastern flank of Hastings’ Old Town, just off the bows of the stade (a word of anglo-saxon origin meaning landing place) rests a once thriving industry. In the middle-ages, a time of great prosperity for the town, Hastings had become one of the key cinque-ports, this prosperity continued for many hundreds of years. During the reign of Victoria I the town became re-marketed as place of gentry, particularly the neighbouring conjoined sibling town of St. Leonards. This transformation into a hotspot of tourism and flanuerism allowed the town to find a source of income of that diverted pressure away from it’s only real commercial industry. Fast forward to 2021, Britain has been subject to a “Fishing Quota” that stipulates how much fish in the English Channel that britain is allowed to catch, an awkward arrangement for Trawlers that can’t choose the amount of fish that are caught in their nets to be sold commercially. This Quota has strangled the prosperity of a historic industry.
With Windfall on The Never-Ending Sea I wanted to depict an imagined future in which this industry had been left to fall into the sea in which it once thrived off, completely reclaimed by the rushes of The Channel.