Lore

HOLEY SPACE <> HOLEY LORE

‘The only physical trace the Sussex salt industry left is its rubbish. The dominant local method was silt-washing — scrape the salt-crusted surface silt, wash it to make brine, boil it down — and the exhausted silt was tipped in heaps, which "are often the only indication that salt working has in the past taken place." Dulley recorded exactly such mounds on the Pevensey Levels. Sussex held more salt workings than any English county, and the Abbey of Fécamp held a hundred of them in one place at Pevensey, before and after the Conquest; by the end of the 1200s the references stop, killed by the innings.’

‘You throw the sea away, keep the salt, and the bittern is what is left over that will not stop being the sea.’

Lore
Curated by Patrick Adam Jones and Peter Fillingham
The Mint House, Pevensey
20th September - 17th October 2026

Opening reception: Saturday 19th September 4pm -7 pm

Open Thursday to Sunday 11am – 4pm.
Out of hours appointments welcome.


Lore: an exhibition at The Mint House

The exhibition Lore brings together a group of artists at The Mint House, a 16th-century Grade II* listed building with a complex and layered history, currently undergoing restoration. The building is being reimagined as a cultural hub that brings together history, folklore, artistic practice, and community.

Curated by Patrick Adam Jones and Peter Fillingham, Lore invites artists to engage with the complexities of The Mint House as a newly shared, ostensibly neutral space, situated between historical fact, collective memory, folklore, and fiction.

The temporary exhibition brings together site-specific interventions and existing works, creating a dialogue between contemporary artistic practice and the architectural, social, and historical conditions of the building.

Working across diverse fields of expertise and enquiry, the invited artists were given a limited period in which to respond to both the proposal and the site. They were encouraged to consider the history, material character, and surrounding environment of The Mint House, with access to rooms and areas of the building that are not currently open to the public.

Through processes of archival and historical research, interviews, observation, experimental fieldwork, and direct engagement with the building, the artists have explored the multiple layers of meaning embedded within the site. Their resulting works reveal, interrogate, and reconfigure aspects of the building’s material and cultural history, producing a series of site-specific installations that respond to its changing identity.

The exhibition takes its title, Lore, from the idea of knowledge transmitted through stories, traditions, and collective memory. In this context, the term provides a framework through which to consider the relationship between documented history and less tangible forms of knowledge: folklore, anecdote, rumour, memory, and imagination.

“The Mint House can be best described as a palimpsest—a reused and altered building that still bears the traces of its earlier forms and histories. This fractured history has provided fertile ground for artistic research and making.”
— Peter Fillingham


Participating Artists

Judith Dean
Laura Emsley
Edwina Fitzpatrick
Mark Ingham
Sara Trillo
Mario Rossi
Peter Lewis and Makiko Nagaya
Matt Hale
Jonathan Whitehall
David Goldenberg
Rupert Norfolk
Dan Damarre
Henry Coleman
Esther Collins
Jamie Atherton
Howard Sooley
Charlotte Cullinan
Alice Walter
Craig Wood
David Lewis
Marie Roux
Mark Spelman
Gihan Karunaratne
Richard Phoenix
Scott Robertson
Simon Barker
Patrick Adam Jones
Dan Howard-Birt
Peter Fillingham

Press enquiries via https://www.minthousepevensey.co.uk/

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