Creative camaraderie......

One of the many reasons I like living here is that St. Leonards and Sea and Hastings have a thriving creative community, with people doing everything from fine art to ceramics, fabric craft to glass blowing and everything in between.

We also have an online forum, Hastings Creatives, which is a great place to go if you need help with any creative project.  So when I needed loads of brass strips cut to length recently, my first port of call was the forum, where, true to form, a number of local metalworkers were suggested, but one name kept coming up over and over.

Leigh Dyer has a studio workshop in Hastings old town, just one street back from the seafront.  He makes the most wonderful sculptures in metal, such as these.......

... and his latest work was unveiled just last month on Hastings' Winkle Island....

Here he is in his studio working on it....

Asking such an artistic creative to do something as mundane as cutting some brass strips for me took a bit of brass neck, but he very kindly agreed to help, especially when I explained that my own feeble attempts had resulted in warped, burred, twisted metal, when what I needed were lovely straight, unwarped, burr-free, untwisted strips. 


Walking up the steps to his studio you are assailed by the sharp metallic tang in air, which only slightly prepares you for the Gormenghast-style space into which you emerge, littered with the paraphernalia of working with metal... anvils, welding masks, oxyacetylene tanks and all manner of eclectic bits and bobs including a skull wearing a fez and a lizard climbing up the wall.  It's an amazing place.....

I'm sure that Hastings and St Leonards are littered with incredible studios like this.  Quite puts my workroom to shame.........