Martin Clark leaves Camden Art Centre to run Towner from January 2027, arriving as work begins at Black Robin Farm. What the appointment means for Eastbourne.

Towner Eastbourne has appointed Martin Clark as its chief executive and director. He joins from Camden Art Centre in London and starts in January 2027.

The gallery announced the appointment on 14 August. It fills the post left when Joe Hill went to Yorkshire Sculpture Park in spring 2026. Catherine Wood, a Towner trustee and acting director at Tate Modern, has been covering the role since.

Who he is

Clark has run Camden Art Centre for close to a decade. Towner’s announcement sets out the rest of his record:

  • Arnolfini, Bristol, curator of exhibitions, 2005 to 2007
  • Tate St Ives, artistic director, 2007 to 2013, where he oversaw a £9 million capital project
  • Bergen Kunsthall, Norway, director, 2013 to 2017
  • Art Sheffield 2016, artistic director
  • Camden Art Centre, director, including a 2025 fundraising campaign to buy the building from Camden Council
  • Turner Prize 2023, jury member, in the year the prize was held at Towner

That last line matters locally. Clark sat on the jury for the Turner Prize in the year it was staged at Towner, so he already knows the building and what it can carry.

Stephen Welton CBE, chair of Towner’s trustees, said the appointment would bring “creativity, expertise and dynamism to the next stage of Towner’s evolution”. Clark said he was “enormously excited to be joining Towner at this pivotal moment”.

The timing is the story

The reason this appointment is worth more than a name change is what lands in the same window.

Towner says development of Towner Seven Sisters, its second site at Black Robin Farm, begins in early 2027, the same month Clark starts. That project puts a new gallery building and a set of restored nineteenth-century Downland farm buildings on the edge of the town, inside the South Downs National Park, within reach of Beachy Head, Birling Gap, the Seven Sisters and Cuckmere Haven.

It is being delivered with Eastbourne Borough Council, alongside East Sussex College Group and the Coastal Schools Partnership. Towner’s own project page traces the money back to the council’s successful £19.8 million bid to the government’s Levelling Up Fund, and the gallery says further funding has since come from the UK government and Arts Council England. The architects are Feilden Fowles.

So the incoming director takes over a gallery that is about to become a two-site organisation, with a construction programme, a second visitor destination and a council partnership attached to it.

What it means for you

Nothing changes at the Devonshire Park building before January. Towner’s exhibition programme, cinema and collection displays run as normal in the meantime.

The thing to watch is Black Robin Farm. If development starts on schedule in early 2027, a new gallery goes up on a stretch of Downland that a lot of Eastbourne residents walk. Access, parking and traffic on the approach roads have not yet been set out in detail, and those are the questions worth asking as the programme firms up.

We will follow the project as the council papers and the National Park’s decisions come through. What else is being built and where is on Eastbourne planning, and days out around the town are on things to do in Eastbourne.

Sources