At the beginning of the exhibition ‘To Farse All Things’ visitors pass through a reconstruction of the entrance into the Dining Room, the vegetarian restaurant run by William English and Sandra Cross for a decade between 1980 and 1990. To celebrate the exhibition, we’ve asked some of the regular diners for their memories.
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In 1980, William English asked Andrew Czezowski, owner of legendary punk club, The Roxy, who had recently taken over the lease of an empty warehouse in London’s Borough Market, if he had a space to let to him and Sandra Cross for a café. A basement at 1 Cathedral Street became the Dining Room: an innovative vegetarian restaurant and a place for artistic collaboration. Sandra devised the ever-changing menus and did all the cooking, while William greeted diners and oversaw the front of house.
The Dining Room opened with a discreet sign above the door on Winchester Walk, with the smell of freshly baked wholemeal bread wafting up the stairs and the daily menu chalked up outside.
As sculptor, Vanessa Pooley, who worked there as a waitress, remembers, ‘To enter the place you had to go through a plain door with a simple sign saying the Dining Room on it. Straight along a little corridor and then down round narrow stairs to the basement. The door opened into a dark cave-like space with beautiful soft moon shaped lights hanging from the ceiling. It was very unpretentious and personal. The place had the atmosphere of a club with regular customers coming in… Everybody who connected with the place had a lot of personality and even when their personalities were out of the mainstream, they were embraced by Will and Sandra.”
“Everybody who connected with the place had a lot of personality and even when their personalities were out of the mainstream, they were embraced by Will and Sandra.”
Vanessa Pooley, Artist
Lea Anderson, Teresa Barker and Gaynor Coward, co-founders of dance companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs were regular visitors alongside their collaborators, including costume designer, Sandy Powell and composer, Drostan Madden. As Lea recalls Borough Market was an unusual place to start a restaurant “It was dark and deserted and Dickensian in the evenings in winter. Artist and musician David Aylward first took me to the Dining Room in 1984. I was living in Peckham at the time and had just formed The Cholmondeleys dance company with Teresa and Gaynor. I thought it was the best place to eat in London and the fact that it was in south east London was just perfect. Borough was not at all a place where people I knew went. I don’t think anyone went there except for the market.”
“I thought it was the best place to eat in London…”
Lea Anderson, choreographer and artistic director
Despite the location, the Dining Room quietly established a loyal following, and critical acclaim followed. In 1987, the Good Food Guide called their ‘menu imaginative and eclectic’. And in 1989 Felipe Figueira in What Restaurant? wrote ‘The Dining Room is reputedly the only vegetarian restaurant in London that can claim a Michelin star, but that’s something they prefer not to boast about.’ Vanessa Pooley adds, “I love, love, loved the food. Unsurpassable. I like to say that Sandra never cooked anything the same twice. That might be a slight exaggeration. Generally she just made something amazing and new every night”.
“The Dining Room is reputedly the only vegetarian restaurant in London that can claim a Michelin star, but that’s something they prefer not to boast about.”
Felipe Figueira – Good Food Guide, 1987
The restaurant welcomed a wide-ranging clientele, including experimental film maker Kenneth Anger, director and founder of the Globe Theatre, Sam Wanamaker, critic and writer Jon Savage, designer Vivienne Westwood, and pioneering lawyer Benedict Birnberg, who on occasion acted as their solicitor.
Artist Bill Burns, whom William hired as a plongeur recalls, “Many people came – it was like magic some Saturdays: Steph from Boy and Jack English and Katharine Hamnett and Vivienne Westwood and so many more. I was not long away from the farm in Saskatchewan, so this was exciting and terrifying and a sublime education. The celebrities were given the same treatment as the well-heeled solicitors, the bankrupt booksellers, Hugh de la Cruz one of the other brilliant wash-up persons who worked on a perpetual motion machine in his spare time and of course Maurice Seddon, a German aristocrat who had lost his fortune but not the sparkle. William and Sandra made the place shine – it was a beautiful thing.”
“Many people came – it was like magic some Saturdays: Steph from Boy and Jack English and Katharine Hamnett and Vivienne Westwood and so many more…”
Bill Burns, Artist
The restaurant was also, importantly a venue for artistic collaboration, hosting exhibitions, screenings, and gatherings. Film maker David Leister remembers “I actually started my film club Kino Club there but under the original heading of ‘Armchair Cinema’ which was me presenting my hand processed 16mm films with live accompaniment. I was fortunate enough to collaborate with such talented musicians and sound artists such as Aleks Kolkowski and John Wynne, both of whom produced finished soundtracks for many of my films. William and Sandra were again very supportive of me in these early days, and provided their delicious food in the intervals between my projections and ‘found’ footage presentations. Good times.”
“William and Sandra were again very supportive of me in these early days, and provided their delicious food in the intervals between my projections and ‘found’ footage presentations. Good times.”
David Leister, Film maker
The Dining Room closed in 1990 and remains overlooked in the histories of the redevelopment of Borough Market. The only mention being in an article published in 2000 from the journal Du Atlantis – quoting designer Ben Kelly, who commented: “There were no other artists or designers in the area, and apart from the local working class pubs and cafés, nowhere to eat or drink apart from one weird vegetarian restaurant in a basement just off the market”.
However, the Dining Room lives long in the memories of those who worked and dined there. As Lea Anderson sums up, ‘The Dining Room closed down at the right time as everything had changed around Borough. Times had changed. We were bereft.”
With many thanks to Lea Anderson, Bill Burns, David Leister, and Vanessa Pooley for their generous contributions.
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Thanks to Sarah Ragsdale for coordinating and gathering the responses from the contributors and for writing this post.
We are pleased to share this opportunity to participate in Paradise Unseen, a project by visually impaired photographer and friend of Bonington Gallery, Karren Visser.
This creative project, supported by Immersive Arts, focuses on disability representation in AI-generated images.
Have you noticed how AI overlooks or misrepresents people with disabilities? AI systems learn from the data they’re given. That data often misses out on including different ages, abilities, genders, races, and body shapes. This leads to a narrow and skewed portrayal of who we all are. Karren wishes to explore building an AI model that is inclusive from the beginning.
How you can take part:
Learn more about the project: https://karrenvisser.com/paradise-unseen-exploratory-phase
Questions?: audiodescribedimages@gmail.com
Contemporary art spaces have always occupied this strange cultural paradox—simultaneously public yet exclusionary, open yet intimidating. There are those who move through galleries with effortlessness, people who know everyone and everything in the art world. Then there are those who enter, half-expecting to be met with some unspoken test of cultural literacy, ready to dismiss ‘modern art’. But the most telling group—the one that reveals the most about what galleries could be—are the ones in between: the students, young adults, people stealing time from their lunch breaks to go to the gallery across town, people who want to engage but aren’t quite sure how.
These initial thoughts eventually led to the ideation of Bonington Connects. Over the past few months, this student-led series has tried to renegotiate gallery spaces, by opening up art and research without watering it down. The first session looked at Bonington Gallery’s autumn 2024 exhibition After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 (curated by Johny Pitts) alongside writings by Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes— theorists that can often seem jargon heavy. But by situating ourselves among the photographs— theory instead of being an obstacle can start feeling like a tool to look at photography and access exhibitions. After the talk ended, the conversation continued into the atrium, where coffee and snacks helped turn what could have been a lecture into a more genuine exchange of ideas.
For the second workshop we had Arianna Tinulla Milesi’s two day lecture and workshop, which took the idea of participation further. As Arianna put it, her project “This room has no walls anymore, but just endless trees” became a literal reality during those two days—a space where art and fashion history, spontaneous interactions and collective drawing came together. Participants discussed subcultural fashion in connection with rituals, community, and the subversive powers of rebellion via identity. On day 2, these ideas were brought to life through transforming their own personal clothing items. It became an exciting intersection of theoretical discussion of ideas from the previous day and conscious collective making, personifying the ideas of building community via subcultural fashion.
For the final iteration of Bonington Connects, we had Cappo and Tom Harris’s sound workshop and discussion. Their conversation brought to life the ideas that went behind Cappo’s exhibition CAPStone and the walkthrough contextualised the objects in the gallery, making it more accessible for the audience. Ending with a sound environment built by Tom Harris, conversation amongst visitors and artists evolved organically over coffee and many visitors later cited this event being particularly inspiring in their feedback.
These events were made possible through support from NTU’s TILT funding, allowing us to experiment with how galleries can become more welcoming spaces, invite external contributors and making sure they are fairly compensated. The events are tied together by their informality and their focus on participation and just the simple idea that galleries should be places for real conversations. Where it’s okay to like things, dislike things, or not be sure. Where big ideas can sit alongside personal responses and where everyone, regardless of how much art they’ve studied, can find something to connect with.
— Vidhi Jangra, July 2025
Bonington Connects was a programme devised and programmed by Vidhi Jangra and delivered in partnership with Bonington Gallery and its exhibition and events programme.
In this series of events, which are part of Jenni Ramone’s project on breastfeeding narratives and representations, Jenni is joined by photographer Karim Iliya, writer ‘Pemi Aguda, and nurse educator Meg Moorman. These conversation events invite us to think about how the arts and humanities can transform the way we practice and understand breastfeeding, health, and our interactions with other animals and the planet.
Join Karim Iliya discussing the hidden underwater worlds and other natural places he has portrayed in photography and films, with NTU’s Jenni Ramone.
Karim Iliya is a photographer, filmmaker, whale swimming guide, and former dearMoon crew member based in Iceland. He also co-founded Kogia, a nature conservation non-profit. Karim grew up in the Middle East and Asia and developed an insatiable curiosity for the natural world which has taken him into the midst of exploding volcanoes, battling whales, ice worlds of the Arctic, and many of the incredible places where humans and animals make their homes. Through his photography and films, Karim takes his audiences to hidden underwater worlds and documents other natural places in an effort to protect Earth’s delicate ecosystems. Karim has worked in over 50 countries, won multiple awards, and his work has been featured in numerous distinguished magazines, documentaries, and publications.
For more on Karim’s work, check out his website and for more of his photos follow this link to his Instagram.
Join fiction writer ‘Pemi Aguda reading from and discussing her recently published collection of short stories, Ghost Roots, with NTU’s Jenni Ramone.
‘Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing has been published in Granta, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, and One Story, among others, and won O. Henry Prizes. Her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and she is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine. Ghostroots, a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award in Fiction, is her first book.
For more information about Pemi’s work, please visit her website, webstore, and Instagram
Join nurse educator Meg Moorman discussing her project on using visual thinking strategies to enrich nursing education and patient care, and considering how the strategies might be applied to breastfeeding support, with NTU’s Jenni Ramone.
Meg Moorman is a pioneering nurse educator whose innovative integration of the arts into nursing education has significantly influenced the development of clinical judgment and holistic care practices. As a Clinical Associate Professor at Indiana University School of Nursing, she also serves as the Coordinator of the MSN in Nursing Education Program and directs the Faculty Innovating for Nursing Education (FINE) Research Center. Dr. Moorman’s contributions have been recognized nationally; in 2022, she was inducted as a Fellow into the National League for Nursing’s Academy of Nurse Educators, honouring her innovative approaches to nursing education. She has presented her research internationally and consulted with various universities and healthcare workers throughout the world. Her ongoing efforts continue to inspire educators to incorporate humanities-based methodologies, like visual thinking strategies (VTS), to enrich nursing curricula and ultimately enhance patient care outcomes. Through her research and practice, Dr. Moorman has demonstrated that VTS can foster a safe learning environment, encourage diverse perspectives, and improve medical professionals’ ability to interpret complex clinical situations. Her work has shown that engaging with art through VTS not only sharpens visual literacy but also cultivates empathy and reflective thinking among nursing students. She was recently accepted into the Harvard Macy’s Art- Museum-based Health Professions Education Fellowship.
Form more information about Meg’s work, please follow this link to their website, and a feature written about this project can be found here.
To accompany Bonington Vitrines #27: Nottingham Subcultural Fashion in the 1980s we are delighted to present a suite of specially commissioned essays by writer Ian Trowell. These describe and discuss in detail the conditions and key attributes of what defined that time – the designers, bands, night clubs and publications – as well as contextualising and positioning what was happening in Nottingham and the region against what was occurring nationally and beyond.
Visit the links below to read each annotated essay, or alternatively you can download a PDF here with accompanying image poster available here. Design by Jess Harris.
A limited number of printed versions will be available from the gallery during the exhibition.
Essay 0.1 – music newspapers, market stalls, stashed carrier bags
Essay 1.1 – bedrooms and living rooms, towns and cities
Essay 1.2 – shopping in the margins
Essay 1.3 – everyday places
Essay 2.1 – rival tribal rebel revel
Essay 2.2 – pop worlds
Essay 3.1 – night people
Essay 3.2 – futurist manifesto
Essay 3.3 – on suits
Essay 4.1 – mentioned in Déspatch
Step back in time and experience the magic of cinema through the decades.
For the second year running, Bonington Gallery is delighted to support students from the BA Film and Television course at NTU in developing, curating and staging a film screening event.
Hit Rewind is a film event celebrating the golden eras of storytelling, style, and culture. From the glitz of old Hollywood to the neon glow of the ‘80s, we’re showcasing short films inspired by the past, reimagined for today. Our hand-selected line-up of films celebrates nostalgia, reinvents retro themes, and breathes new life into cinematic history.
Join us for a nostalgic night of film, creativity, and retro vibes. Whether you’re a film lover or just looking for a unique and immersive cinematic experience, this is your chance to hit rewind and relive the past on the big screen.
Costumes inspired by your favourite era and characters from film history are strongly encouraged.
Hit Rewind is curated by Back to the Pictures who are a group of Nottingham Trent University students studying Film and Television in the School of Arts and Humanities.
Credit: Image from How does A.I. work? (Noah Reiner, 2023). Website: https://yourfriendnoah.me/
We’ve had a great time working with second year Nottingham Trent University English students on their Literary Practices module where they have been producing articles, events, resources, and public-facing outputs on the theme of Literature and Visual Culture.
Ahmad Almatrouk, Omar Almutairi, Mitzi Stanford and Karina Watracz have assembled a written response to our September 2024 exhibition with a piece entitled A multi-cultural response to Bonington Gallery’s latest exhibition: ‘After the End of History: British Working Class Photography (1989-2024)’. This also included an in-person tour and introduction event in the gallery. Enjoy the read…
After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024 is a Hayward Gallery touring exhibition curated by Johny Pits, who is a self-taught photographer, writer and broadcaster from Sheffield, England—a Northern soul child. He is the product of an African American musician father and a white working-class mother who taught English in the Yemeni community. These identities are reflected in the show by his purpose of emphasising the perspectives of practitioners who turn their gaze towards both their communities and outwards to the wider world, so instead of looking at working-class people, the exhibition will explore life through the lenses of working-class practitioners, who have not only turned their gaze towards their own communities but also out towards the world.
As a part of a project for one of our English modules focusing on visual culture, in our second year of studying the English BA course at Nottingham Trent University, four of us (Ahmad Almatrouk, Omar Almutairi, Mitzi Stanford and Karina Watracz) had the opportunity of reviewing and analysing Bonington Gallery’s autumn exhibition After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989-2024. To conclude our review and close analysis of the exhibition, we shared our study by conducting a walking tour with our module leader Jenni Ramone, other NTU faculty and a few postgraduate researchers; we took them around the exhibition for a tour of the art as seen through our eyes and related the photographs to our own backgrounds, cultures and personal responses. The guided tour ended up being a very stimulating and successful event.
There are 25 artists in the show but we have focused on 5 that we felt greatly interested in and connected to: the culturally gendered and baffling work of Kelly O’Brien, Richard Billingham’s deeply intimate and beautifully mundane portraits, Hannah Starkey’s interesting portrayal of women in urban settings, Chris Shaw’s delicately private lens of working in hotels and Tom Wood’s somewhat unsettling and dismal but quietly astounding set of photographs documenting the stages of life through bus stops.
This blog post consists of our own writing and pondering on the reflections of our own backgrounds within the works and exploring the contexts and meanings behind decisions surrounding this exhibition and from close conversation with Gallery Director Tom Godfrey; we aim to shed light on this unique and thought-provoking show.
Starting with Ahmed’s reflection on Kelly O’Brien:
The photography of Kelly O’Brien highlights issues of gender roles, class identity, and the unseen labour of working class women. Her personal art is influenced by her own upbringing in a council home with an Irish immigrant single mother. O’Brien’s photographs reflect the everyday lives of women and domestic places, especially those of her grandmother, Nana, who is depicted as the cleaner. Her art challenges us to consider what is apparent and what is invisible in our daily settings, whether they be at work, school, or home.
“I am going to focus on these 3 pictures, ‘Nana’s Bathroom’ (2014), ‘Cleaner No.1’ (2022) and ‘Cleaner No.2’ (2022).
O’Brien’s ‘Nana’s Bathroom’ (2014) caught my attention due to the use of light colour. The photograph shows a simple, nearly empty bathroom. The yellowish, off-white walls evoke council housing, which highlights the working-class experience, and the lack of material belongings suggests a life that lacks luxury, creating a possible underlying anti-capitalist message within the photograph.
In ‘Cleaner No.1’ (2022) and ‘Cleaner No.2’ (2022) we can see the direct invisibility of labourers; in both photographs, the cleaner’s faces are hidden. This facelessness symbolises how domestic workers are often only seen through the lens of their labour and their identities are overshadowed by their work. The plain white background emphasises her anonymity, making this a universal representation of many labourers whose work goes unnoticed. Coming from an Arabic background where we have an increased amount of labour, I personally felt that O’Brien’s photography has taken this information from my mind and accurately articulated the situation there. All the people who are working in honest jobs are just treated like people in the background or as stated before, “invisible,” which is heartbreaking but truthful.”
Karina’s contemplation of Richard Billingham:
Richard Billingham, is a photographer, artist, filmmaker and art teacher from Birmingham. Billingham’s work highly focuses on family life and a lot of his work features the house that he grew up in, his parents, and his brother.
“Billingham is one of the most impactful artists to me within the entire exhibition. Billingham’s photographs are some of the biggest photographs on display in the gallery; the size of the photographs is very effective, although it is the details in his photographs that awaken quite a visceral reaction within me. The settings of both photographs on display are very squalid: dirty walls, a random cloth on the bedhead, dirt on the armrest of the sofa, Billingham’s father in the bed who appears to be sick, and his mother doing a jigsaw puzzle. This kind of impoverished and dirty environment is a constantly recurring theme within Billingham’s work and it is something which makes him a deeply vulnerable artist.
What makes Billingham’s art even more vulnerable is the fact he uses his own family house as setting and his own parents as subjects. I think the exhibitionist nature of this kind of exposal of his family home and his family, when he clearly grew up in quite difficult circumstances, takes a lot of courage. When I was doing my research on Richard Billingham, I came across the website of another gallery which had his work on display, and I found some of Billingham’s commentary on his work displayed in that gallery and his family. The images which Billingham talks about are different from the ones displayed here, but the subjects are the same. Billingham states that: ‘The pictures shown here are of my father Raymond (born 1931): my mother Elisabeth (born 1950) and my brother Jason (born 1977). Ray is a chronic alcoholic and has drunk for as long as I can remember. He has not worked since he was made redundant from his job as a machinist around 1980. Liz very rarely drinks but she does smoke a lot of cigarettes. My younger brother still does not seem to know what he wants: he gets a job for a week or two and then leaves it. I think he is very lazy.’
Billingham’s work really reminds me of my grandmother’s house in a village in the South of Poland where I spent many of my Summers as a child. My grandmother was extremely poor, as were many other people in Poland due to its very long recovery from communism. The conditions in my grandmother’s house were also very dirty and squalid, but I always admired it, because it was home. Even though Billingham doesn’t shy away from presenting and talking about his gritty background, his art possesses a visible sentiment and love for his home and his family.”
Mitzi’s views on Hannah Starkey:
Hannah Starkey is a Belfast born artist who favours themes such as women depicted against urban backgrounds, which is abundantly visible in this large-scale work. This piece is untitled and it is the only work of hers included in the show. This photograph is a showcase of mundane realism in art; the typical British setting juxtaposed by a striking, confident woman highlights the beauty of the mundane and monotonous world and how we fit into our surroundings.
“One person could think she stands out as an outrageously incongruous character in this scene which could connote fear in the viewer but I personally think she dominates and foregrounds the scene, like she knows she’s different but wants to stand out. This work is significantly gendered but the feeling of not fitting in is universal. I can relate to Starkey and the woman in this photograph; growing up working class definitely has its negative and untrue stereotypes. I remember walking down the street with my parents who are working class punks who look like they just stepped out of a Sex Pistols gig and feeling overwhelmingly alien compared to the area I grew up in. Moreover, the sky is dark, gloomy and almost sublime in the painterly, ‘Turner’ sense of how scary the power of nature can be, it is almost as if God could strike down any second and destroy this dynamic moment in time. The colours of the background are very dull, and dark which creates an antithesis between the foregrounded character in the composition who stands out as she has red hair, wearing pink boots and long blue socks, she’s making a statement. It makes us wonder, is this an unnatural environment for her? Does she feel nervous being there or comfortable? There are 2 other figures in the photo who are void of colour and fade away with insignificance compared to the female perspective which dominates, linking back to the themes that Starkey focuses on. Additionally, connecting this work to the Working class theme running throughout this exhibition felt distanced and difficult for me at first but when you think about Starkey’s intentions and forcibly peel your eyes away from the interesting and dominating woman in the foreground you can see that the writing on the right wall above her is a mural which were common around Belfast for both Protestants and Catholics to acknowledge the loss of life in battles such as WW1, this specific Loyalist mural is commending the South Belfast brigade and the subtle inclusion of realist horrors, a sense that ghosts are lingering on the street contrasted with a woman dressed in Japanese, Lolita style clothes who objectively does not fit into the environment feels so surreal and dystopian that it intrinsically displays themes of the working class life, especially the merging of identities.”
Omar on Chris Shaw:
Shaw was born in Wallasey Merseyside in 1961; he is a documentary photographer and one of his most well-known works, Life as a Night Porter, came from years of working in hotels across Europe, often during night shifts. He stated that:
the reason that I got the hotel job was I was homeless, actually, and a way to get out of my homeless situation would be to get a job in a hotel which had staff accommodation, …
“Having to keep himself awake, he started taking photographs to help him stay awake so he wouldn’t get fired. He took photographs of anything he found bizarre that he encountered; from naked drunk men, drunk people locking themselves out of their rooms, which to him it’s what he hated the most. He wasn’t interested in capturing conventional beauty. Instead, he gravitated towards raw and sometimes uncomfortable truths about society, and that was an era when photographers were pushing boundaries, but Chris stood apart from that by having a dark and an intensely personal style. I find something haunting about the way he captures isolation in crowded urban environments, and that’s a reminder that even in the most populated areas, there are stories of loneliness and solitude. Chris started capturing these spaces and the people within them, creating photos that feel like stolen moments, as if the viewer is seeing something that’s not meant to be seen.
What makes his work particularly powerful is the aesthetic that he developed; his photographs are usually black and white, often grainy or underexposed. This style brings a feeling of mystery and darkness, making each scene feel raw and real. He was heavily influenced by photographers like Anders Petersen and Daido Moriyama, who also embraced imperfection and darkness over polished visuals. Chris made this style distinctly his own, using it to reveal an almost cinematic quality that captivates the audience. His photographs have been displayed in exhibitions around the world and published in books like Life as a Night Porter and Weeds of Wallasey. Through his work, Shaw has built a unique legacy in documentary photography, inspiring others to seek beauty in places and moments that might go unnoticed.”
Back to Mitzi looking at Tom Wood:
Wood is an Irish born artist who lived in Merseyside between 1978 and 2003 before moving to north Wales. Due to costs, he uses versatile mediums such as old fine film and out of date filmstock which lends a grainy quality to his images. For over 15 years, Wood documented his bus journeys through photography, capturing an extensive collection of images that culminated in his renowned series All Zones Off Peak in the late 1990s.
“Within these photographs, the bus transforms into a stage, with passengers assuming the role of performers. Some subjects confront the camera directly, while others gaze dreamily out of the windows, seemingly unaware of Wood’s presence. At times, the perspective shifts outward, as figures on the street appear blurred by rain-speckled glass; in other moments, Wood’s lens reverses the gaze, observing them from outside the vehicle. His bus journeys depicted take place in Liverpool; the images show diversity and intimate daily life of strangers looking into or through bus windows, even so that the viewer’s own reflection also becomes a part of the image. His work is shown through 4 framed photographs symmetrically placed forming a square, titles include: Towards Huyton (1992), Chester Bus Station (1992), Lime Street, Liverpool (1995) and Kirkby (1996), all the photographs are analogue darkroom prints on Maxima Gloss. Two of the photographs are taken from the interior of a bus, the first scene is decorated with characters, children who are innocent of mind and distracted by their individual lives; to me it’s quite a peaceful and humorous image. There’s graffiti on the interior, a nod to your average busy bus passing through working class neighbourhoods. You don’t particularly focus on one figure or face, it’s a universal theme of mundane life but also intimate and arguably beautiful. The other photograph taken inside of a bus is a combined lens of the interior scene and another bus looking in, the windows are foggy, reminding us of a chilly rainy day, figures are looking at one another between buses, it’s an awkward experience we’ve all had. The tilted angle provides an unstable composition, perhaps suggesting a tension between the characters within the two buses looking at one another, one young and one old.
The two other photographs are taken of people waiting at bus stops, one shows two young girls directly addressing the viewer by looking nervous and/or judgemental at the camera in a visually unappealing and dreary bus stop. The other image contrasts greatly by portraying mothers and their children also waiting for the bus, another mundane, very day life scene, but the viewers eyes lock straight onto a glamorous looking woman and mother wearing a pink blazer and rocking an 80s hairstyle, she’s dominating the scene by juxtaposing herself (not on purpose perhaps) with the setting of a busy bus stop. However, her eyes are cast downwards, almost in submission or deep though, maybe even sadness. I’ve thought long and hard about what she might be thinking about, but I can’t quite figure it out, so this work left me slightly unsatisfied but heavily intrigued.”
And that concludes our review of Bonington Gallery’s Autumn 2024 exhibition. Throughout writing this blog and figuring out how to talk about art in this way we really had to challenge ourselves to see from different perspectives; the art existing in the exhibition forced us to talk to one another about our own backgrounds, which we quickly realised were worlds apart as we all come from very different upbringings, but all undeniably working class which gave foundation to the universally relatable topics of conversation that we had during this process. It brought us together, as we saw ourselves in the photographs we were also able to understand each other potently. For those of you who missed the exhibition then it travels to Stills Gallery, Edinburgh in March 2025.
Written by Ahmad Almatrouk, Omar Almutairi, Mitzi Stanford and Karina Watracz.
For an exhibition in March 2025, we are running an open call for materials that relate to Nottingham’s independent fashion scene in the 1980’s.
This period was an exciting time for homegrown fashion and style culture. Brands such as G Force, Olto, Cocky’s Shed plus others combined local talent & style discernment, with entrepreneurism & DIY attitudes to start labels, open shops and form connections and influence on a global level.
Do you have any Nottingham labels in your wardrobe? Did you start/run/work for a local label? Did you shop at G Force? Do you have photos of you and your friends wearing garb to The Garage? Did you pick up copies of Nottingham’s style pages Débris or Despatch? etc etc! If so, we’d love to hear your anecdotes, see your photos and materials (Eg. photos of night out, flyers, receipts, magazines, brochures) that relate to the scene and time.
The intention is to build a collection of material that will become part of the exhibition, and if contributors are happy, have this preserved within a growing archive of material going forwards.
In the first instance please email boningtongallery@ntu.ac.uk with any information and digital copies of materials (just snaps on your phone is fine) and we can take the conversation from there.
On the occasion of the Design & Digital Arts (D&DA) building launch in November 2024, Bonington Gallery is delighted to have partnered with Nottingham School of Art & Design to develop and present two specially commissioned art installations by design practice Foxall Studio and artist Matt Woodham – both working at the forefront of their respective fields and industries, and both past exhibitors at Bonington Gallery.
Whilst distinct in approach, each commission considers the technological potential within the D&DA building; the generosity it awards to different forms of creative practice; and the dynamic collaborative ethos that drives the student and staff community. This community has been central to the realisation of both commissions, actively involved in the production of digital material that will be visible across the building and in learning from professional practitioners, recognising the endless possibilities of collaboration and engaging with new equipment & methodologies.
Taking the approach of a ‘hack-day’, Foxall Studio ran three consecutive 1-day workshops in October with 40+ undergraduate students from 9 courses in the department. Working in small groups and supported by a technical team, students channelled their individual and collective practices through a variety of technologies to rapidly produce a diverse range of digital artwork and creative content. Foxall Studio then operated as magazine editors, utilising and framing this content to produce an expansive ‘digital zine’ that will be seen displayed on screens throughout the building.
Also inspired by the dynamic encounters between people and the spaces in D&DA, and working directly with staff and students from our new MSc in Creative Technologies, Matthew Woodham’s project in room 103 creates a simulated world of interacting organisms with unexpected possibilities. Woodham has created an interactive and immersive real-time installation to generate ‘novel dynamics’, by allowing visitors to alter parameters of a reaction-diffusion system in a specially created computer programme. The audience collaboratively constructs the projections in the space, adapting the experience for the viewer. Through doing this, visitors can consider the relationship between individuals, wider communities and the space they inhabit.
The D&DA building is not open to the public, but two public tours of the commissions will be led by Bonington Gallery Director Tom Godfrey on November 12th & 14th that anyone is welcome to join.
Book: Tuesday 12 November (1pm – 2 pm)
Book: Thursday 14 November (1pm – 2pm)
Founded in 2006, Foxall Studio has collaborated with global brands such as Vogue, GQ, Google, and YouTube. With expertise in branding, art direction & design, Andrew and Iain lead innovative, experimental projects that challenge traditional approaches to brand building.
www.foxallstudio.com
Matthew Woodham is an artist who works across disciplines. His practice explores system dynamics in nature through research and practical application. His academic background in cognitive neuroscience has informed an expanded study of the common dynamics and structures described by physical and mathematical principles. Woodham is based between Nottingham and London, and graduated from The Royal College of Art in 2023 with an MA in Information Experience Design.
www.matthewwoodham.com
Designed by award-winning architects Hawkins\Brown, and delivered by local architects CPMG, the new Design & Digital Arts Building will place Nottingham as a UK hub for film, television, animation, UX design, games design, graphic design and more.
We are delighted to confirm that legendary Nottingham rapper Cappo will perform at the launch of our next exhibition After the End of History: British Working Class Photography 1989 – 2024 on Thursday 26 September, 6-8pm. Be sure to book your free ticket! He’ll be accompanied by Claude Money playing records throughout the evening.
Find out more about Cappo:
LeftLion interview from January 2024
Killa Tapes interview
Cappo interviewed for Fly Fidelity podcast
Dr Paul Adey is a Higher Education lecturer of Music Performance and Music Business at Confetti Institute of Creative Technologies (part of NTU).
Performing under the artist name of Cappo, he has practiced hip hop lyricism for over two decades. During this time he’s had the privilege of appearing at many of Europe’s premier live music venues, performing alongside artists such as Public Enemy, Skepta, and Sleaford Mods.
Throughout his career he’s released music on various record labels including Tru-Thoughts and Ninja Tune, and featured live on BBC Radio One (John Peel), BBC Radio 1 Xtra, and BBC Radio 6 numerous times.
Paul’s interdisciplinary research focuses on popular culture, literary devices and music concepts such as intertextuality and allusion, and the semi analysis of song lyrics. The interdisciplinary nature of Paul’s research links his work to Music, English, Creative Writing and Media Studies.