Deal Music and Arts Festival collaboration
The DOVER Urban Room
On July 5th 2025 at 11am, The Deal Music and Arts Coastlines festival presented a musical morning in the home of artist Joanna Jones.
Artist Nicolas Deshayes wrote: “Jones first came to Dover in the late 1940s, travelling with her mother to its shoreline from where they continued to France. Her mother’s energy lightened when they reached Dover, and the town has since symbolised the gateway to Joanna’s “other world”. In 1997 she returned after living on the continent of Europe for 20 years, making a nest for herself here in the clouds above the port.”
Joanna thanked Deirdre Wells and Sue Blake from the Deal Festival for all their help and welcomed all 30 participants to this event with visual art, music and literature.
The artists involved are the Deal festivals young artist in association, cellist Hoda Jahanpour, artist and writer Simon Bill, myself and all the artists represented by the artworks you see around you most of which are here because the artist and I have exchanged works.
In conceiving this salon I wanted to find a way to reveal something about my paintings to you through lived experience. All three artforms will weave between each other and the space in co-operation during the morning.
My paintings result from a process that positions the body as an agency of a particular kind of knowing taking painting into the territory of an event. The four large egg tempera paintings on view span 36 years – there are two from the Eisen series from 1991 on the landing as you come up the stairs, and did time just stand still? from 2002 in the stairwell and in the library from 2017 Let the bitter be bitter and the sweet be sweet until the bitter and the sweet become one. Words, I first heard spoken by activist and mystic Jim O’Dea and which we have taken as the theme for this Salon.
My painting language speaks not of the body but with the body. When I talk about a paintings emergence as an event, I mean a constitution of elements that make what happens happen: the consistency of the paint, my choice of colour, what vibrates through my body, what rings in my ears and what fills my heart and concerns my mind. Each work is different, it is the seemingly never ending world of possibility that this sensual painting process incorporating the mind and the body, produces that I am exploring.
The paintings are not to be understood they are to be explored and experienced. I know this is a big ask requiring a real engagement by you to go beyond the threshold of trying to understand them and enter them with that same sense of exploration.
Everything you see around you holds a story for me and as part of my experience has become part of my process.
Please feel free to look at anything and also please feel free to sit on any chair.
The participants moved through the three spaces starting in the hall way and stair well where Hoda introduced her first piece. Hoda explained that she had chosen the three pieces that she would play over the next hour responding to the salon theme Let the bitter be bitter and the sweet be sweet until the bitter and the sweet become one. This first piece Dolcissimo by Pēteris Vasks responding to bitter.
Then back to the urban room where Simon Bill read from the chapter light from DOVER his new book of 12 essays on Dover. Followed by Hoda’s second piece Low Sun, Lovely Pink Light by Alice Zawadski responding to sweet.
Then a move to the third enviroment where Hoda played her third piece -Bach’s Cello suite VI Sarabande.
The hour ended back in the urban room with a conversation with all three artists and participants inspired by the salon theme Let the bitter be bitter and the sweet be sweet until the bitter and the sweet become one.
Photos Kate Beaugié
