What is it to be formed by places you are now removed from?
Where is the ‘site’ of an accident you carry around with you all the time?
Twenty years ago Dan Belasco Rogers stepped off a National Express coach in Nottingham for the first of many times. For the next three years he lived in the city as a student: formative years that ended in 1989 when he returned to London. Years, in which he fell in love, broke bones, broke laws, lost friends and found most of his physical limits.
For these fragments … Dan returns to Nottingham and puts his forty year-old body through the streets he walked as a twenty year-old. He will discover, chart and reveal those events and accidents that have remained in his body and memory. He will chart a personal cartography of association, event and impression that has gone to form his own biography.
these fragments… is a multi-screen video presentation of corresponding journeys and locations in Nottingham, London and Berlin. It is informed by the artists’ practice of collecting with a GPS (Global Positioning System), every journey he has made since 2003.
Eight contemporary visual artists: Said Adrus, Robert Ball, Giles Corby, David Farrell, Michael Forbes, Mik Godley, Martin Godwin and Raksha Patel will comment on ‘life after death’ and the remaining visual legacy which gets incorporated into everyday life. We are presented a world where the body and soul no longer remains, where symbols leave footprints of the lives that have gone before.
The show includes a diverse range of subject matter: the removal of an Indian military grave in Woking, the humble pacemaker, the seductive attraction of guns, Northern Ireland landscapes that hide horrors of the past, child mortality in relationship to poverty, Nazi secret bunkers built by slave labour, roadside floral memorials, isolated apocalyptic landscapes and coloured fountains built in honour of the martyred dead. The exhibition contradicts all perceptions of morbidity and celebrates the natural beauty that arises through life, whilst recognising the frailty of human existence.
Future Factory, based within Nottingham Trent University, in collaboration with the New Art Exchange, is proud to present The Redemptive Beauty of Life After Death, curated by Michael Forbes. The exhibition which takes place in The Bonington Gallery runs from 13 January until 17 February 2007.
Nine contemporary visual artists practicing in Korea: Solim Cha, Jung Jong-Mee, Kim Dong-Chul,Kim Hye-Ran, Kim Hyun-Soo, Kim Sun-Doo, Park Young-Geun, Suh Yong and Yoo SunTai present an eclectic mix of work that explores Korean heritage and transforms traditional Korean techniques into modern-day mediums.
The show makes a reflective comment on what it means to be Korean through a variety of different techniques. Traditional materials such as Jang-ji paper, practices such as fresco painting and iconic Korean motifs such as Wild Grass serve to illustrate the way these artists balance contemporary concerns with an exploratory view of a cultural legacy.
The subjects explored by the artists are no less significant than the materials and processes they adopt. Investigating the gender associations made in relation to objects; taking a subjective view of the past; attempting to express the intangible qualities of natural and organic matter; analysing the value of labour within the production of an art-work; and exploring the all pervading effects of codification are some of the thematic threads that run through this exhibition.
A collaboration between Future Factory at Nottingham Trent University and Duru Artspace Korea
Cha Solim’s work is created from an obsession with language and codification. The sewn work is indicative of text, but it is indecipherable; the ‘deliberate error’ points to the fallibility of communication through symbols and codes. The act of sewing is significant: the laboured performance creates its own semantic system.
Jang-Ji is the basic material in the work of Jung Jong-Mee, which she combines with a laborious process as a way of honouring her cultural heritage. The bright and cheerful images, inspired by traditional Korean paintings, belie the physical graft that goes into each piece of work, as Jong-Mee grinds, soaks and pigments the paper that she creates.
Kim Dong-Chul’s paintings, though heavily suggestive of landscapes, provide a sense of nature rather than details of it. In an attempt to maximise emotional responses to natural phenomenon, Dong-Chul exchanges the specific for an evocative mix of form, shape and colour.
Combining domestically sourced wooden beams with textiles and needlework, Kim Hye-Ran creates coverings that embellish and become a part of the salvaged wood. Interested in gender associations, Hye-Ran juxtaposes masculine and feminine objects and uses needlework as a method of large scale construction.
Kim Hyun-Soo draws with pen on semi-transparent silk to create complex and detailed work that explores the transient nature of organic matter. Described as representing the sound of nature, the drawings highlight the cyclical and holistic connections between living things.
Using traditional paper, Jang-Ji, to create subtle blends of colour and glue, Doo attempts to express the driving force behind the lives of ordinary people. The abstract paintings, with their shifting perspectives, are suggestive of landscapes and often include the motif of wild grass that Doo uses as a metaphor for Korean people.
Pak Young-Guen has created an image genealogy to acknowledge and counteract the fact that an ‘objective history’ can eclipse subjective or personal history. The physical process involved in creating his work suggests an uncovering and rediscovery of the past.
Seven years of studying frescoes first-hand has informed Suh Yong’s work, in which he looks to create a harmony between the past and the present. Yong has harnessed his knowledge of fresco technique and developed a new painting style incorporating metamorphosis and restructure.
Using acrylic on canvas to produce high-contrast, muted palette paintings, Yoo Sun-Tai momentarily suspends the difference between the real and the imagined by taking everything imaginary to be real. Sun-Tai suggests that his paintings are best viewed in a meditative state of mind.
In this ambitious new commission the artist has created a five-part moving image installation in response to Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children). The result is a unique project which fuses contemporary visual art with classical music and literature.
This exhibition has been commissioned by Picture This in Bristol and Opera North, in partnership with Impressions Gallery, Bradford and Future Factory at Nottingham Trent University.
The relationships and encounters we have with both real and imagined locations will form the basis of a breathtaking exhibition of recent paintings at Nottingham Trent University. Closer than you think: painting, place and mortality, is the inaugural exhibition by Terry Shave, Professor of Fine Art in the University’s School of Art and Design.
A base image layer, inspired by photographs and previous artwork by Professor Shave, is built upon over time by the hand application of multiple layers of coloured resin; the result is a collection of striking images with intense depth and colour. Each image is presented in three sections, each unique, but achieving a sense of equilibrium through the harmonising of colours which thread through the piece.
Sketches and doodles by art and design staff at Nottingham Trent University are to be shown as part of a major exhibition celebrating the practice of drawing.
Drawing Out will feature hundreds of illustrations by both academic and support staff, which will be combined to create a huge ‘drawing wall’ for the event from 21 April to 9 May.
Everybody from the Dean of the School of Art and Design, right through to academics and support staff are being invited to contribute to the exhibition, being staged in the university’s Bonington and 1851 Galleries.
The event will also feature a curated show of work by artists based in the School, which will attempt to look at drawing in its widest sense.This will range from working drawings for set and costume design, to illustrations that use new laser-cutting technology as a drawing tool; and a series of illustrations produced for publication in international newspapers, to photographic responses to archived drawings in the university’s international lace collection.
‘Fictions’ brings together the work of eight contemporary artists who explore the boundaries between fact and fiction. Taking its name from the collection of short stories by Argentinean writer Jorge Louis Borges, the exhibition draws on the paradoxical scenarios he creates.
In Borges’ world, ideas of language, time, memory and truth surpass our everyday expectations. As an exhibition, ‘Fictions’ aims to sketch out these relationships within the context of our contemporary society.
This exhibition is curated by High Dichmont and Fay Nicholson, who will be exhibiting work alongside fellow artists Eugenia Ivanissevich, Glen Jamieson, Aaron Juneau, Girolamo Marri, Helen Perkins and Marianna Simnett.
The private view for this exhibition will take place in the Bonington Gallery on Thursday 19th March between 6-8pm. All are welcome to attend.
A major car crash has occurred in the gallery – a head on collision. Skid marks are emblazoned across the floor, there is wreckage everywhere and blood is splattered up the walls – glistening and fresh. You are being filmed by surveillance cameras, are you the victim or perpetrator? Sections of the gallery seem inaccessible, areas cordoned off by hazard tape… is it a major disaster, a crime scene or spoof horror film?
Craig Fisher’s exhibition, CAT-AS-TROPHE consists of a large-scale sculptural installation. Fisher’s sculpture, It’s Uncanny 2008 (two replica mini cooper cars) are constructed from carefully selected fabrics which are seductive in nature and ask the viewer to question the representation of violence laid out before them. Fisher makes work that situates itself in a world of contradictions. He plays with our perception, challenging us to consider notions of art and craft. He references both high and low culture and juxtaposes the pictorial with the sculptural, creating potential spaces of slippage which act as a challenge to our habits of looking.
The theatricality of Fisher’s installations allow the viewer to engage in a narrative interplay and his work often makes reference to ideas of filmic or cartoon violence. A sense of saturation and the anodyne is at play in Fisher’s work. It is easy to miss the horror through the materiality of the artwork. The strange familiarity of crafted objects, and the voyeuristic quality of such imagery is highlighted by the craftsmanship of the detailing, sewing and pattern-cutting. By contrasting fabric and craft with these images, the artist subverts the significance of masculinity and challenges notions of representation.
Funded by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
Katja Hock is a practising artist and a senior lecturer in Photography in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. Her latest exhibition will present a slide installation, Stillness and Silence that has been developed over the last three years. The work addresses the importance of historical memory to our present perception of our cultural and social context.
As part of this exhibition Katja Hock will be in conversation with Susan Trangmar, Reader in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Located in the Bonington Gallery, this event is open the general public and admission is free.
During the summer of 2008, ten disabled actors from Teesside University were asked to explore their own day-to-day movements: dancing, cycling, cleaning, walking, running and eating. The resulting work, Motion Disabled, uses motion capture and 3D animation to create a kinetic connection with the human form – beautiful everyday, virtual movements highlighting all the intricacies and uniqueness of each person’s physicality.
Nottingham Trent University is proud to present this exciting installation by Simon McKeown, which enables the viewer to engage and explore ideas of normality and difference.