This month, Lincoln has been treated to Scarborough Macabre, an off-season sojourn to the seaside in which artist Melody Phelan-Clark “regurgitates the strange and sinister nature of the British coast, once the summer season has passed”.
This is right up my street. Not literally – I got a train from Sheffield to Lincoln to see it – but anything dark and discombobulating is always a draw. I must also declare a massive bias because the artist is a cherished friend, but she’s a brilliant creator who is so committed to her craft that everything she does is fiendishly compelling: gothic, ghoulish, ghastly, grotesque and, ultimately, gorgeous.
Red foil fringe curtains, the kind seen in seaside chippy doorways, flank the exhibition’s entrance. An eerie soundscape fills the space with distorted arcade game noises, seagull cries and snatches of ‘oh, I do like to be beside the seaside’ on the Wurlitzer organ. The lighting is halfway between the ultraviolet of supermarket toilets and the sharp shadows of a fairground haunted house. A guide in the style of a tourist information pamphlet accompanies the exhibition, explaining each piece under the banner of ‘Twisted Information’. Phelan-Clark’s signature red, black and white colour scheme dominates, with brown, gold and pink in support. Four distinct pieces bring everything gothic and gaudy about Scarborough to this blank space in Lincoln. 
With Scarborough Macabre, Phelan-Clark wanted to “conjure the feeling of trudging through heavy, sodden sand, the wind thwacking against a flapping anorak, eyes screwed up against the rain and cold…or looking out at the oily black sea at night, with the reflected illuminations bobbing against the surface, and feeling like truly anything could be lurking in its depths”. I ask her about the motivation for focusing on faded seaside glamour.
“The kitsch ornamentation of the British coast holds unique visual appeal,” she says, “its merging with the uncanny and sinister” being huge motivation for this body of work. There is pathos, too, in the subject matter with “the tragedy of these once grand resort towns becoming underfunded and unappreciated”, the poverty-stricken nature of some seaside towns another theme.
“I have fond memories of visiting Scarborough as a child, it was our family haunt whenever possible. To me this place is rich, crammed with history, strangeness, intrigue and an iconic skyline. This exhibition is my attempt at bottling just a fraction of the odd energy of towns like Scarborough, and bringing it back in my suitcase to Lincolnshire.”
Beside the seaside, beside the sea…
The host of Scarborough Macabre, General Practice, is an artist collective living and working in Lincoln, including Phelan-Clark who originally grew up in Doncaster. In this exhibition, she reminisces on half-term family holidays to Scarborough and her return trips to the town as an adult. The work also feeds on the seaside scares of horror fiction, namely M.R James’s Oh, Whistle And I’ll Come To You, My Lad, and the books by Scarborough-born Susan Hill.
Hill, author of the gothic novel The Woman in Black, describes her imagination as being “rooted in the seaside landscape and the town”, saying “the coastline, the cliffs, the sea, the beautiful curve of South Bay, the public gardens, the cliff trams, the smell of the rock pools, the massive winter storms…have threaded in and out of my dreams for 70-plus years”.
Phelan-Clark identifies The Woman in Black as one of the “ideas and entities” that inspires Scarborough Macabre, saying that “the haunted marshland setting of The Woman in Black can be read as a reflection of Scarborough and its desolate beaches in winter”. The play’s stage debut was also held in Scarborough, in 1987 at the Stephen Joseph Theatre. The 1989 television adaptation, written by Nigel Kneale and directed by Herbert Wise, is Phelan-Clark’s favourite “with its atmospheric eeriness and incredible energy”.
With Scarborough Macabre, Phelan-Clark gives us eeriness and incredible energy in buckets. And spades.
All photos by Melody Phelan-Clark
Scarborough Macabre is at General Practice in Lincoln until February 16, 2025.
