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The Isle of Wight, known for its beaches and a rock festival that featured Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, has had setbacks in manufacturing, but there have also been bright spots.

Perched off England’s southern coast, the Isle of Wight has long relied on its sandy shores and coastal charm to power its local economy. But beneath the postcard facades, serious challenges are mounting. Rising coastal erosion, combined with creeping pollution and financial pressures, is reshaping how the island must protect its future.

Tourism remains the island’s lifeblood. Though overall visitor numbers fell in early 2025, short stays and day‑trips surged, and those who came spent more per visit. Local businesses from cafés and galleries to accommodation are adapting to a new norm: fewer footfalls, but fatter margins. Meanwhile, the loss of family groups and constraints from ferry connectivity pose fresh headwinds to growth.

On the environmental front, the island’s coastline is under threat. Some beaches suffer from sewage discharges and erosion; urgent plans are underway to fortify sea defenses, especially along vulnerable stretches like Yaverland. At the same time, a new stretch of the King Charles III England Coast Path has opened, with provisions for realignment as erosion pulls the shoreline inward.

Amid these pressures, the Isle of Wight’s identity is being tested. Its seaside landscapes are not just backdrops for leisure, they are active battlegrounds for sustainability, resilience, and reinvention. The island’s fate may well offer a microcosm of the dilemmas facing coastal communities everywhere.

Seventeen generations of dockworkers preceded Wietse Van Der Werf, but he struck out on his own—leaving school at 15, drifting through odd jobs, and eventually restoring violins in Nottingham before a carpentry gig took him to Antarctica. There, a chance meeting with conservationist and North Face founder Doug Tompkins helped seed his vision: the Sea Rangers Service, a maritime training program that brings the technical training of a maritime college to adventurous young nomads with a love for the sea. Since 2018, Sea Rangers have secured government contracts across the EU and UK, tackling everything from hydrographic mapping and drone surveillance to seagrass restoration—marrying adventure, conservation, and opportunity on the open ocean.

Opening: October 15, 2025

Duration: 16 October 2025 – 8 March 2026 

The rise of the smart city and the exponential increase in data production is leading to the construction of large digital infrastructures like data centers and undersea cable networks. In turn, data is the new gold. This puts pressure on the extraction of more critical resources like lithium and copper and expands the demand for electricity and clean water, placing enormous strain on the natural environment and consequently displacing humans and non-humans. The exhibition critically examines the impact of smart cities and digital infrastructures through the lens of materiality, citizenship, and heritage. Discussing the potential role of the smart city in creating democratic and eco-technological collective futures.

Architekturmuseum der TUM, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich.

Duration: 12 September 2025 -19 October 2025

‘Beautiful Giants? Architecture and Energy in the Mirror of Photography’ due to open in Bern in September 2025, will explore energy-generating architecture as an artistic subject. Energy keeps our society running. Nuclear power plants, wind turbines, pipelines, coal-fired power plants, dams, offshore platforms: Although energy is invisible, its production has a spatial footprint. This architecture, which is not focussed on aesthetics but on technical and commercial success, is very imposing and integrates poorly into the landscape. We cannot do without it, but it arouses contradictory feelings in us. Can we still find a certain beauty in it? This photo exhibition at the Kornhausforum Bern opens up a debate about these familiar yet strange buildings, about our relationship with them and about their future.

Kornhausforum Bern, Switzerland.

Participating artists: Yan Wang Preston, Gerhard Stromberg, Catherine Hyland, Uta Kogelsberger, Wassily Kandinsky, William Cowen, Anthony Fry, Prunella Clough.

Exhibition dates: 28 March – Wednesday 7 May 2025
Gallery: Hatton Gallery, gallery 4

Theme: Human-nonhuman relations: humans’ relations to the materiality of urban and rural environments in process of transformation and economic development.

Newcastle University's Hatton Gallery has been at the heart of cultural life in the North East since the early 20th century.

Founded in 1925 and named in honour of Professor Richard George Hatton, professor of what was then the King Edward VII School of Art, Armstrong College, Durham University. He subsequently became Head of the Department of Fine Art at Newcastle University. 

The Hatton’s diverse collection includes over 3,000 works from the 14th – 20th centuries. Key pieces in our paintings collection include works by Francis Bacon, Prunella Clough, Richard Hamilton, Palma Giovane, Patrick Heron and William Roberts. Works on paper by artists including Thomas Bewick, Thomas Hair, Wyndham Lewis, Linder and Paula Rego are also held.

The gallery also has extensive archive material including paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings and textiles, and material connected to the history of the Gallery, such as exhibition posters designed and printed in the art school.

The Hatton stages a programme of modern and contemporary art exhibitions, and events including artist and curator talks and family activities. Working closely with students from Newcastle University and exhibiting their work on an annual basis.

​Private View: Francis Alÿs

The Belgian artist brings his Children’s Games to London’s Barbican for an immersive celebration of the universal ingenuity of play

Since 1999, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has engaged with the universality of play while travelling the world, documenting the ingenuity of children’s games across different global contexts. Illuminating the limitlessness of children’s imaginations – transcending war and challenging circumstances – the games become intimate portraits of childhood against varied socio-political landscapes, with play as an invisible thread.

From ‘musical chairs’ in Mexico, to ‘leapfrog’ in Iraq, ‘jump rope’ in Hong Kong, and ‘wolf and lamb’ in Afghanistan, Alÿs’ decades spanning Children’s Games project becomes the center of Francis Alÿs: Ricochets – an immersive exhibition that turns London’s Barbican into a cinematic playground. In the first presentation of the video works in the UK, multi-screen installations construct a dialogue between distinct and distant regions, alongside a new body of animated films, depicting the simple gestures of hand games.

For a film by Catherine Hyland, created with the Barbican, Alÿs explores how games and creativity enable children to interact with their environments – while creating distance from nuances beyond their understanding. By triggering memories and establishing a commonality among viewers, Alÿs expands on the power of play as an invitation to enter a new dimension, and a means of escape from the conflicts that permeate the adult world. 

Francis Alÿs: Ricochets is on display at the Barbican Art Gallery until 1 September 2024.

Private View: Anna Dickinson

Profiling the British artist and the materiality of her sculptures for her first solo exhibition in Denmark at von Bartha, Copenhagen

British artist Anna Dickinson has been creating vessel-like objects for more than 45 years, expanding upon the distinct language between light and glass by enabling an unpredictable dialogue to occur through the materiality of her sculptures. As the foundations of Sentient / Forms, her first solo exhibition in Denmark at Copenhagen’s von Bartha gallery, 13 new pieces are dispersed as if alien, conscious beings on a foreign planet, developing sentience and inviting close examination of the interactions between them.

In a short film directed by Catherine Hyland – showing at von Bartha alongside the exhibited works – Dickinson engages with her artistic process and the motivations that power her work. Connected to her dyslexia and medical interventions, fragments from her daily life become quiet inspirations for her creative interventions and the way she views the world, playing with opacity, transparency and distortion to build forms intended to interact with their environment.

“The more I ride, the more I work with glass, I see these similarities. The hours and hours of grinding the glass to make it look perfect.”

Likening the hours spent perfecting her sculptures to the repetitive training she undergoes through her tenacity for riding dressage, from her London studio, Dickinson pours years of expertise and dedicated technical skills into her creations. As the forms evolve from hollow vessels to incorporate complex structures of small tubes, she reflects a fascination with engineering and combining different materials, developing resonant juxtapositions, rooted within her own experience through materiality over sentimentality.

'Moon Rock imagines a not-too-distant future when lunar mining could take the strain off material resources on earth'