Photos by Steve Painter

Beccy McCray will be no stranger to those working in Hastings and St Leonards’ art scene, local environmental activism, or simply out and about around the place. Keen-eyed Get Hastings readers may even remember her from Louise Coulthard’s 2023 piece on allotments. Working across multiple disciplines, blending visual storytelling with the natural world and social themes, her disparate interests coalesce into a wild creative practice that sees Beccy grace this issue’s cover shoot amid moss, ferns, rocks, vines and pink smoke in Fairlight Glen – the local temperate rainforest.

It was four years ago, an auspicious meeting in Church Wood Nature Reserve, Hollington, when we first met, introduced by a mutual friend. I turned up both an hour late and two hours early for the debut performances of Hastings’ witchy-folk-banshee favourites, Message From The Ravens. It was a timely, albeit mistimed, escape after one of the lockdowns. Numbers were limited by government decree, and much missed Jimmy Riddle was unofficially holding fort, welcoming the curious and word of mouth attendees into the forest. The event was Wilding, an off-grid arts festival, organised and curated by Beccy as a community-led nature-based opportunity to reconnect after so many weeks restricted by the response to the pandemic. In dappled sunlight falling through vivid green leaves, it felt like there was magic, release and
synchronicity in the air. Boundaries dissolved and fresh energies were abundant.

The journey into the woods, and more recently the rainforest, are branches sprouting from a trunk that has its routes in Hampshire. Brought up in sleepy Andover, east of Stonehenge above the A303, Beccy’s first influences which still feed into her art today, include the beyond-human time scales of prehistoric monoliths and stone circles, the mysticism of crop circles and their nod to other lifeforms, and the free parties, road protests, and ascendant rave culture based on peace, love and unity.

Drawn by the bright lights and possibilities of thebig city, she studied graphic design at London College of Printing, now part of University of the Arts London. A little shy of referencing this, it’s important to recognise that the best way to break the rules is to be aware of them in the first place. The rigidity and planning of design as a specialism is something she both uses and challenges in much of her artwork, even if it means unlearning some of the schooling she’s had, “As it can be to the detriment of my own artistic self-expression.”

An organised mind, as well as a creative one, was what led her to Shoreditch and work with Nexus Studios – a global film and experiential design studio. Over a decade, Beccy worked on music videos, immersive experiences and started an arts and culture division but ultimately became a little disenfranchised by the rat race and the innate commercialism of the media industry. It wasn’t about biting the hand that feeds, so much as feeling she was facilitating the creativity of others at the expense of her own.

Whereupon, we come to Crafternoon Tea Club. More than a great name, this was arguably the beginning of the career balancing act that she has been perfecting over the years. Around 2007, Beccy and another creatively frustrated friend started meeting up over a few drinks and made loads of colourful human-sized collages. “It was crazy, unwholesome fun.” It started with scissors, magazines and paper and ended in dancing, hands in the air. They repeated it a month later, and then again, soon outgrowing one of their flats, graduating to a local pub and then, very unexpectedly, getting a call from the Barbican. Numbers went from fifty to five hundred in a few weeks. It took on a life of its own, with commissions and events around the 2012 Olympics and National Theatre, even Bestival hosted one of the ‘craft mash ups’.An organised mind, as well as a creative one, was what led her to Shoreditch and work with Nexus Studios – a global film and experiential design studio. Over a decade, Beccy worked on music videos, immersive experiences and started an arts and culture division but ultimately became a little disenfranchised by the rat race and the innate commercialism of the media industry. It wasn’t about biting the hand that feeds, so much as feeling she was facilitating the creativity of others at the expense of her own.

This unlikely scenario gave Beccy confidence to reduce her hours in production and spend more time exploring her own creative endeavours. It was also, along with a chance episode of Location, Location, Location back in 2010 with local illustrator Scott Garrett, when she and her future civil partner, furniture maker Mark Thomas (www.makermark.co.uk), made the move to Hastings. They quickly adopted some space in the Bohemia Walled Garden and over time, took on a larger allotment plot. This move, while reading key text Do Good Lives Have To Cost The Earth? (a compendium of essays around the climate crisis and our individual responsibilities and agency in responding to it, as well as the benefits and pleasures of a more sustainable lifestyle) further
galvanised Beccy’s focus at the intersection of art, ecology and social engagement. A grant for Developing your Creative Practice from Arts Council England helped sharpen her attention on the themes of her work and provided space and time to undertake some courses and research.

It is widely accepted that creativity can inspire change and shift perspectives. Building on Beccy’s move, environmental enlightenment, growing creative commitment, and the idea that things begin at home, her work and projects naturally grew in a parallel fashion. Her practice is purposefully playful, actively participatory and
often collaborative. It is also ultimately hopeful in the face of significant global challenges. Like with her Marina allotment, a space she’s tended even longer than her project-filled St Leonard’s studio, the way to hope for a better future is to make tiny actions to facilitate it.

Mindfulness around sustainability and living a less consumerist lifestyle has brought Beccy to a new appreciation of moss, and not merely for this photoshoot. She explains that it is one of the world’s oldest living plant types, around for some 470 million years so far. Her Moss Club is an appreciation of taking things more slowly, of ‘radical slowness’ and consideration for the natural world not rushing. Human intuition
is being dulled by modern life, much like the disruption of migratory patterns of other
species. Taking things more slowly with greater care is how she believes we can avoid burnout, reclaim and better trust our instincts in an era of mass data.

There could be a misconception here, of this all being too free-spirited or hippyish – not at all. Beccy embraces technology as a tool to help engage and tell stories. In a recent Northamptonshire project, Intuition Maps, participants mapped speculative climate futures in parallel to local species’ seasonal journeys. As part of it, Beccy trained an artificial intelligence compassionately at odds with the usual AI venture capitalist funded programmes. She instructed the entity to avoid using the word ‘nature’ as it creates an in-and-out either/or ideology. We are, she argues, all nature. Everything is nature. She also wanted the device to be accepting of migration and, by extension, welcoming to refugees. An issue relevant to Hastings not merely with contemporary Channel crossings but at least since the Norman invasion.

I asked the Beccy-trained artificial intelligence, how does being based here influence her work? Its response, “Beccy’s connection to Hastings and St Leonards feels woven into the fabric of her work. These coastal towns are places of constant
movement, shaped by the tides, the weather, and the ever-shifting human and more-than human migrations that pass through… Living by the sea instils a deep awareness of change. The coastline itself is a kind of map in motion, redrawn by erosion, storms, and rising sea levels. This impermanence seems to resonate with her fascination for fluidity, instinct, and the ways in which beings — whether birds, people, or ideas – navigate a world in flux.”

Closer to home, just outside of Robertsbridge, Lorna Ough, curator at blackShed added, “I loved working with Beccy on the In Every Shadow project, her work HAG (part Blair Witch, part acid house smiley face) brilliantly blended folklore, feminism and cultural commentary and its mysterious presence in the local woods caused a big stir among locals! She is great at bringing people together and highlighting/commentating on climate change without being preachy or gloom and doom. Important in these times!”

Beccy agrees, “With my work, I’m always trying to generate conversations and bring people together – I feel like that’s my life’s work.”

Working in an interdisciplinary way, with people and communities, in natural environments unconfined by traditional art spaces and usually over a temporary period, there is not, as you might imagine, much to take away beyond memories and photos. So, how does an artist activist make their way in the world and pay the rent when there isn’t a product to sell?

It’s back to the balancing act and the space to be able to say yes. Away from full time employment (while keeping the door open to opportunities), invitations to residencies and commissions offered by public bodies and charities have taken Beccy from the New Forest to London’s V&A, from last September’s We Are A Sea on the local shoreline to the rainforests of northern Brazil. The layered histories of Greenham Common (an upcoming residency exploring folkloric character the green man, the commons, and the Greenham women’s peace camp), like many other commissions and opportunities, came about by a combination of recommendations and applications. For every financially supported project, such as Climate Nan’s Caravan, a movable, lighthearted and costumed interactive experience, starting conversations about climate change, there’s a counteract. Don’t Frack With Sussex, for example, was a Long Man of Wilmington anti-fracking activation that made national news by the hill figure appearing to hold up a banner proclaiming “Frack Off!”

There is a sense of rebellion in much of Beccy’spractice. Inherent in the history of dance music and activism, there are beliefs and freedoms of sounder moral standing than the limitations of the law. This ties in with the wisdom of instinct within her work as well – and the message that we should all listen to our own more intently. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the bright psychedelic neons and smiley faces of rave culture are
regular motifs in her work. Blending them with more natural settings creates vibrant clashes, an aesthetic she refers to as ‘acid folk’ or ‘neon pagan’. She muses, “I’ve been thinking lately, is the smiley face, the urban Green Man of the last thirty years?”

Returning to her all-is-nature philosophy, “In some ways, technology is like humankind’s highest effort at biomimicry.” She continues, “Technology is like our highest effort to express nature, things like interdependence, interconnections, decentralisation, all of these things.”

Fairlight Glen, part of Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve since 1974 and geologically formed sometime following the Early Cretaceous epoch 140 million years ago, made for a magical backdrop for these images. Beccy was game to brave the fresh cold water and nestled within the scenery at one with a wider ecosystem. “It’s really important that my work is not in the echo chamber, and actually it’s really inclusive.” Although there was some fluorescence and joyful subversion amongst the trees, the creative rebellion of the shoot was caught on camera and all shipped safely back out, leaving no trace.

Art doesn’t emerge in a vacuum. It is shaped by lived experience, personal history and the environments people move through. Beccy’s aesthetic choices, beliefs and passions all feed into her practice in ways that are deeply embedded in her approach to creativity and participation in the time we live in. What comes next? “I’d love to be able to make bigger things… Physically big, you know, huge, the budget and the space to— I’ve just got loads of ideas.” There are sketch pads piled high in her studio, all full of acorns ready to grow into giant oaks.

* * *

Follow Beccy on Instagram @beccy_mccraycray
–
beccymccray.com
–
beccymccray-workwork.com