The Platform Panel Project (2024)
The Platform Panel Project at St Leonards Warrior Square (SLWS) Station in St Leonards-on-Sea raises awareness of local railway history. It highlights those who built and worked on the railway when it first opened.
Explore the panels designed by lead artist Yasmin Aishah on the railings in front of the SLWS station ticket office.
Fossil Finder in us All (2023)
Mary Anning fought to be included in fossil finding as a working class woman. Today, we celebrate Mary’s findings and contributions to the field of palaeontology.
Throughout the Autumn of 2023, Yasmin Aishah lead a diverse team of early career community arts facilitators with ExploreTheArch, in partnership with Hastings Museum & Art Gallery to inspire families to explore natural forms on the beach.
The project aimed to switch up who’s doing the ‘finding’ on the shore, empowering those from under-represented ethnicities in the ‘Finding' community to take part. The project encouraged access of a free natural resource in this coastal town through the exploration of shape and colour as primary motivations for selection of things to value.
‘Finder families’ were welcomed to post-finding meet ups at the town’s museum with hot food and drinks to share their personal value of the forms collected on the beach - shells, stones and fossils - in video recordings.
This connection, foregrounding personal approaches to 3-D forms and agency in artistic appreciation of form, then became the subject of Aishah’s exhibition in the Walkway Gallery at Hastings Museum and Art Gallery championing this creative change-up alongside a touring Mary Anning installation, running Nov 2023 - Jan 2024.
Four Courts Connect: Inter-generational Community Wellbeing
Starting out as a project empowering Hastings’ very own Four Courts High Rise community in collaboration with communities in Kyiv in 2022 ExploreTheArch project ‘connecting conversations’.
The community-based programme officially began in 2023, lead by Yasmin Aishah and a team of early-career creatives. The programme engages participants with new research of our local Four Courts heritage and celebrating those within the community as well as weekly activities facilitated by the team. This community is one that is often ‘overlooked’ or ‘forgotten’ in local surrounding areas, resulting in residents feeling isolated and a lack of engagement with other communities.
Four Courts Connect aims to celebrate our landmark 60’s high-rises and work alongside their residents and community groups, with a goal to reduce isolation and for residents to be proud of their iconic space within the town. The team is taking on heritage research, online presences and an under-used community hub that will soon host an array of visual & aural creative vibrance and inter-communal connections. This project is celebrating this forgotten community and is putting it back on our street maps!
Find out more about Four Courts Connect