New intervention at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery

Curated by artist Kim L Pace, Family Secrets is a special intervention in the ceramics collection at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery. Pace’s strange, surreal and symbolic figures are placed in dialogue with the museum’s collection; animating ceramics from function into fiction. It is open now until Sunday 25 January. 

Pace’s new story-vessels and ceramic sculptures reflect her fascination with the different ways we experience the world, and how the lives of those before us shape who we are today. Blurring the line between artefact and emotion, Pace’s objects evoke the sense that each becomes a container—viewers are encouraged to imagine what family secrets, forgotten narratives, and intimate truths might be held within these works. Drawing upon historical sculptural and ceramic forms and the silent inheritance of family history, Pace’s objects also remind us that the adjacent museum objects, along with their secrets and provenance, are also passed down and passed on. 

With “Tureen (For Shame Soup), 2025” and the accompanying “Bowls for Shame Soup, 2025”, Pace delivers a sharp perspective on the family meal table. Here, the metaphor of soup as satisfying nourishment or sustenance is disrupted, as she re-imagines the tureen—a large serving dish holding soup to be ladled into individual bowls—as a container for the deeply corrosive emotion of shame. Pace’s soup set recalls the idea of ‘dishing out’, linking shame to class difference, social codes, and exclusion, while also pointing to the universality of these themes. 

This project continues in the Seaside Gallery with a display of unusual yet familiar ceramic tools, including a dressing table set with brush, comb and mirror set by invited artist, Jane Millar. Millar is fascinated by the ingenuity of souvenirs and their magical function in recalling memories, and her ceramic objects are made to imitate locally-found materials such as chalk, mirror and flint. She is influenced by material cultures, and the ways everyday and historical functional objects are displayed in museums. 

Hastings Museum & Art Gallery is an Arts Council England National Portfolio Organisation, which means funding thanks to taxpayers plays a huge part in supporting our work.  

Find out more about the Family Secrets exhibition.