Join us in exploring a 15-year history of the application and appropriation of motif across a wide range of design cultures, and play a part in reinterpreting the future relationship between image and message.
Bonington Gallery is delighted to present Motif, an exhibition and experience that brings together 15 years of research conducted by Nottingham Trent University’s Tim Rundle, Principal Lecturer in BA (Hons) Fashion Communication and Promotion.
Motifs have become the cultural hieroglyphics of our times, charting a new labyrinthine set of semiotics that reflect shifts in social identity and consumer behaviour. As the new cryptologic visual shorthand, motifs have become a dominant form of communication, from tote to tattoo, replacing text with emoji, logo with image, city name with icon. Adopted as both badges of belonging and icons of individuality, motifs can be understood as markers of creative conformity or aesthetic innovation.
After 30 years of aggressive shifts in design, our relationship to retail, consumption, personal and lifestyle narratives are unrecognisable. One of the key markers of these global changes is our adoption of motifs.
Exhibition Graphic Design by Joff + Ollie Studio
Exhibition Animations by Simone Elverum-Hunt
Between Monday 16 December and Friday 10 January we are delighted to welcome Nick Chaffe & Bruce Asbestos as our Motif Artists in Residence. Working within the gallery, both practitioners will create work in response to the premise of the exhibition that will then be manifested through a public display. Bruce Asbestos will work towards a presentation of his S/S 2020 Fashion Collection, and Nick will work towards a currently undetermined outcome. Follow our digital channels for updates.
Bruce Asbestos lives and works in Nottingham, UK. His broad work encompasses performance, painting, clothing, social media, computer games, and a multitude of collaborations. Recent projects and exhibitions include: Bruce Asbestos x Juliana Sissons 2019 Collection, A/W 2018 Collection Nottingham Contemporary and Kunstraum, London, an Arts Council International Fund project to NYC and Philadelphia, Bruce Asbestos A-B Testing, Concrete, Hayward Gallery, London. MTN DEW, Commission by EM15 for ‘Sunscreen’, Venice Biennale. Ivan Poe, Plymouth Art Weekender (Main commission as ‘Reactor’).
Nick Chaffe is a graphic artist, illustrator and brand designer based in Manchester. He has worked with Amnesty International, The Oscars, Time Out, London Jazz Festival, Manchester International Festival and more locally Nottingham Contemporary and 200 Degrees Coffee.
A decade and a half of research into the use of motifs in design and culture has resulted in the creation of two new workshops that will run in January 2020 here at NTU. The sessions, designed for both teachers and designers, will offer a series of new tools to change your approaches to the use of brand, design, motif, and image.
Find out more and reserve your place now:
Join A Common Craft for a Day of Ritual to end the Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites exhibition at Bonington Gallery. Through a series of workshops and aural experiences, we will share techniques in grounding, healing, and everyday magical practices. No experience or prior knowledge is necessary. The day will be split into two sessions, each involving two rituals, as outlined below.
Please note that booking is essential for each session, as we have limited places available.
I – Join celebrant Keli Tomlin to explore the creation of sacred space and the practice of grounding, both for ritual and in daily life. We will work alone and as a group to examine different methods of grounding in the moment and in your environment, as well as considering the protective and inspirational qualities of a space made sacred.
II – Elemental incantations: An immersive sound healing ritual with Freya Barlow, Blue Firth, and Isabel Jones, using the voice as a tool for communal healing, relaxation, and comfort. Please bring something cushioning, like a blanket or mat for your comfort on the floor.
Book your place for Day of Ritual: Part One (11 am – 12.30 pm)
III – A live ritual performed by Hawthonn. A transcendental aural experience calling in potential alternatives for our political climate through magic, sacred feminine archetypes, and relationships with the landscape.
IV – A closing ritual with Fourthland to commemorate and give thanks.
Book your place for Day of Ritual: Part Two (1.30 pm – 3 pm)
A Common Craft is a series of podcasts about the archetype of the witch, witchcraft and magic and how these subjects may affect our daily lives – sometimes without us even noticing. Through interviews and storytelling, each episode will present a journey through occult ideas, feminism, healthcare, gender, and popular culture. A Common Craft was made by Blue Firth commissioned on behalf of Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, a touring exhibition which looks to the importance of craft, ritual and land on the practice of the ever-shifting figure of the witch.
The Other Film Club presents The Other Side Of The Underneath (1972), the only British feature film to have been directed by a feminist during the 1970s. Directed by Jane Arden, this powerful film explores the mind of a young woman diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Alleged madness is found to be an act of social oppression.
One of the most outspoken and radical feminist voices in British Theatre and cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, Arden has since been virtually silenced by her near-invisibility: her books long out of print, her plays unperformed, and her films unscreened until recently.
This event is the second in a series of screenings and discussions organised by The Other Film Club that forms research into the radical feminist and experimental filmmaker Jane Arden (1927-1982). The series is hosted by Paul Bryan, an MFA Fine Art student at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), with the support of Nottingham Contemporary, and in collaboration with Bonington Gallery. Paul will be joined in conversation with Susan Croft from Unfinished Histories. This event is a collaboration with the public programme for Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, hosted by Bonington Gallery from Friday 27 September to Saturday 16 November 2019.
An introductory performance by NTU’s recently graduated Fine Art students exploring Arden’s poetry and prose will be followed by an in-conversation between Susan Croft and Paul Bryan for exploring Arden’s artistic practice after the screening.
If you would like to attend this event, please RSVP to confirm your attendance.
Please note this film has an 18 certificate and contains explicit sexual images and nudity.
The Other Film Club is a screening programme organised by Paul Bryan that has previously screened films regarding the practices of Sarah Lucas, About Sarah (2014) directed by Elisa Miller, I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015), directed by Marianne Lambert, and Penny Slinger Out Of The Shadows (2018), directed by Richard Kovitch.
Jane Arden (1927-1982) was a Welsh film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter and poet. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw Arden cementing her reputation as one of Britain’s leading feminist voices with such films as Separation (1967) and Anti-Clock (1979), the multimedia play Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven and A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches’ born out of the Theatre group set up by Arden called Holocaust. In 2009, her three films Separation, Anti-Clock, and The Other Side of the Underneath were restored and re-released by the BFI.
Susan Croft is a writer, curator, dramaturg, performance archive consultant and historian with special interests in women playwrights, black and Asian theatre in Britain, live art and new writing for performance. Unfinished Histories was established in 2006 by Croft and Jessica Higgs with the aim of recording the history of British alternative theatre between 1968 – 1988.
In Works from the Hallucinated Archive, Wayne Burrows brings together material by six artists (five real, one fictional) who work across a range of media and traditions but all share an interest in ideas around folklore, spiritual belief and art as psychic manifestation or transmission.
The vitrines and foyer are occupied by works from the fabricated archive of an entirely fictional British artist, Robert Holcombe (1923 – 2003). Gathered into an exhibition that might be read as a scholarly contribution to a previously unknown (and wilfully esoteric) chapter in the story of Post-War British Art. Or perhaps a fiction exploring ideas of authenticity, class and cultural identity by ‘restoring’ to our attention a figure who might plausibly have existed, but failed or refused to fit the standard narratives and frameworks of his time.
This archival fiction is further layered and complicated by its deployment as a framing device for a group of works by five other artists, mostly contemporary, sometimes hallucinatory in effect, and all real. Their shared fascinations with altered states, fringe beliefs, folklore and ritual, play against their own (and our) ingrained sceptical instincts with humour and a strong awareness of absurdity. After all, whatever the precise nature of any particular psychic or paranormal phenomenon might be, such subjective experiences plainly share conceptual ground with the transformative, healing and wish-fulfilling objectives of art itself. Just as a fiction is a very literal kind of alternate reality, a song, a form of spell-casting or invocation, and any film or photograph in existence is a very literal kind of ghost.
The artworks and fictional ephemera featured work together as something that exists between a curated group show and a single installation to generate a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ rabbit-hole: a collage portal into a parallel world that may already exist within the familiar yet often nightmarish one we currently inhabit.
Aslı Anık, Arianne Churchman, Maryam Hashemi, Robert Holcombe, Chloe Langlois, Z.K. Oloruntoba
Launching our 2019/20 season, we’re delighted to present Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites – an exhibition looking at the importance of craft, ritual and land to the practice of the ever-shifting figure of the witch.
The British Isles have a particularly strong relationship to magic and the occult, with the chants of witchcraft echoing throughout their history. Traditional witchcraft has a strong connection to the earth, and an intimate knowledge of herbs, plants and the elements, as well as the human body. As gatekeepers to altered consciousness, witches have been both feared and sought out for their dealings with the unknown. Historically persecuted as an outsider, the witch has been taken on by artists as a challenging force to prevailing norms, and as a symbol of dissidence.
Looking to symbols, tools and the coven as a space for focusing collective intent, the artists in this exhibition explore the path of the witch as a way for us to connect with the earth and each other.
Ben Jeans Houghton will open the exhibition with an improvised performance, expressing aspects of his own magical practice through a harmonic voice and the spoken word, using repurposed effects pedals, loopers, ritual tools, and costume.
Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites is a UK touring exhibition curated by Legion Projects and supported by Arts Council England.
Verity Birt, Anna Bunting-Branch, Nadine Byrne, Mary Beth Edelson, Fiona Finnegan, Blue Firth, Fourthland, Georgia Horgan, Ben Jeans Houghton, Serena Korda, Candice Lin, Katarzyna Majak, Monica Sjöö, Lucy Stein, Ayesha Tan Jones, Cathy Ward
The Other Film Club presents Penny Slinger: Out of The Shadows (2019), a newly released documentary produced and directed by Richard Kovitch, that focusses on the practice and life of the radical artist, filmmaker and performer Penny Slinger. Out of The Shadows explores overlapping concerns in experimental narratives, female sexuality, the occult, and social taboos, as well as how the personal histories of artists can intertwine through radical alliance.
This event is the first in a series of screenings and discussions organised by The Other Film Club that forms research into the radical feminist and experimental filmmaker Jane Arden (1927-1982). Arden was a close collaborator of Penny Slinger where they co-artistic directed and were members of the feminist theatre group Holocaust. The series is hosted by Paul Bryan (MFA Fine Art student, Nottingham Trent University), with the support of Nottingham Contemporary and in collaboration with Bonington Gallery.
Following the screening, join Penny Slinger and Paul Bryan for an in-conversation exploring Slinger’s artistic practice and feminist surrealism.
Please be aware this film has an 18 certificate and contains explicit sexual images and nudity.
Penny Slinger (b. 1947) is a British-American artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Slinger created her first book 50% The Visible Woman while at college and exhibited her pioneering Feminist Surrealist collage work in Young and Fantastic at the Institute of Contemporary Art in 1969, followed by two solo exhibitions at the Angela Flowers Gallery, London, in 1971 and 1973. In 1971, Slinger joined Jane Arden’s first all-woman theatre troupe in England called Holocaust and performed in the feature film The Other Side of the Underneath (1972). Her work has been featured in major exhibitions internationally. Slinger’s upcoming solo exhibition Tantric Transformations will be on view from 28 June – 24 August 2019 at Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.
The Other Film Club is a screening programme organised by Paul Bryan that has previously screened films regarding the practices of Sarah Lucas, About Sarah (2014) directed by Elisa Miller, and I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015), directed by Marianne Lambert. Look out for a forthcoming screening of Jane Arden’s The Other Side of the Underneath (1972), the first feature film directed by a woman in the UK.
On the occasion of our current exhibition C/J by Chloé Maratta and Joanne Robertson, please join us for an in-conversation event exploring key themes raised by the exhibition.
The discussion will be chaired by Tom Godfrey (Bonington Gallery Curator and Curator of C/J) and will feature Naomi Braithwaite (Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at NTU and custodian of the FashionMap Archive), Ruby Hoette (Designer and researcher and Programme Leader of MA Design: Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths University) and Caroline Stevenson (Curator, writer and lecturer and Head of Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion).
We’ll be exploring themes and attitudes relating to the roles of artists and designers within archives; inter/post-disciplinary practice; cultural hierarchies and archives in academia. The intention will be to make the conversation as open as possible and we welcome contributions from the audience throughout the event. Light refreshments will be provided.
Naomi Braithwaite is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at NTU where she is part of the Fashion Management Marketing and Communication team. Her research draws from Material Culture to explore the intersections between clothing, shoes and identity. Naomi’s ‘Shoe and Tell’ project examining teenage identity through the lens of footwear, was featured at the Being Human Festival in 2017 and on Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed programme in November 2018.
Led by Naomi, FashionMap is a unique archive of garments and accessories which have been sourced from British High Street retailers since 2000. Naomi’s current research uses FashionMap to explore how a collection of high street garments can become a valuable archive for the future.
Ruby Hoette is a designer/researcher exploring fashion in context through the intersection of theory and practice. Seeking to expand what constitutes ‘fashion practice’, her approach proposes critical and experimental modes of engaging with and producing fashion by framing the garment as a unique artefact that carries traces of social, cultural and economic interactions and transactions. Ruby is a Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London where she currently convenes the post-disciplinary programme MA Design Expanded Practice.
Caroline Stevenson is a London-based curator, writer and lecturer. She works closely with emerging and established practitioners and institutions to research and develop new projects and create space for experimentation, dialogue and exchange. She has produced projects and programmed events for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, V&A Museum, ICA, Arcade East, Tenderbooks, Kunstverein München, Onomatopee, Dutch Design Week and a range of temporary spaces.
Caroline’s research and curatorial work focuses on interdisciplinary practice and artist-led culture. She is co-founder of Modus, a platform for expanded fashion practice, and she publishes scholarly writing on art and design practices.
Caroline is Head of Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion where she co-runs the Visual Arts at LCF Research Hub and is a member of the Centre for Fashion Curation.
People have been focused so long on what is inside the vitrine, that nobody has ever looked at the vitrine itself. They are passive agents of display, and it is about time they had their chance to tell their own story!
Curated by the Bonington Student Curatorial Group, this exhibition challenges the notions of the vitrines as display cases and brings them to life as the forefront of the exhibition – to challenge traditionally perceived notions on their use.
By presenting an alternative on the accepted narrative of what these objects are capable of, Complaint will explore the vitrines’ life outside of the gallery, and the pressures which they face in their day to day life.
Curated by the Bonington Student Curatorial Group.
Bonington Gallery is delighted to present C/J, an exhibition of newly commissioned work by Los Angeles-based artist, musician and jewellery designer Chloé Maratta and Glasgow-based artist and musician Joanne Robertson.
Reflecting their shared interests in clothing, both artists have been invited to work with artefacts from Nottingham Trent University’s (NTU) FashionMap Archive, a unique collection of garments and accessories purchased from high street retailers since 2000.
Maratta embeds her practice into her life via a process of gathering clothing and ephemera that she encounters and experiences on a daily basis. Materials are collaged into styled outfits and extended into photography, photo-collage and sculpture.
Robertson works predominantly with painting that frequently extends beyond the canvas to found objects. Presenting racks of clothing alongside her paintings, Robertson objectifies garments in order to emulate the conditions of abstract painting – form, colour, surface and materiality. She’s currently touring her music in New Zealand, and answered a few questions from Undertheradar.co.nz, in which she refers to the upcoming exhibition at Bonington Gallery, as well as discussing the process of collaborating with other artists, and the strong link between her music and visual practices.
Through art production, music and fashion, both artists convey an immediacy and irreverence towards various forms of cultural and social hierarchy, making the involvement of NTU’s high-street fashion archive all the more poignant.
Exhibition resources:
Discover the life and work of lithographic artist Lawrence Gleadle. See some of his original posters, alongside prints of others, and learn the stories behind them; how they were lost, found and restored, and their importance and place in British cinema history. The exhibition also explores the stories behind Netherfield printing company Stafford & Co. and the printing process of the 1920s and 1930s.,
Lawrence Gleadle was a lithographic artist for Stafford & Co. in the 1920’s and 1930’s; at the time the largest printer of posters in England. After a long apprenticeship and years of experience, Lawrence became ‘The Big Head Man’, the artist who drew the portraits of cinema stars and advertising characters. It was a title given to him by other artists, of which he was very proud, as the ‘Big Head Man’ was regarded as the most skilled of the artists.
He kept samples of his work but left in WW2 and never returned to the trade. The posters were put away and forgotten for many years until given to his son Godfrey (Goff) Gleadle in the early 1980s. At that time, it was very difficult to find out about or reproduce the posters and it wasn’t until 2015 that Goff was able to identify, date them and scan them onto computer files so prints could be made.
Kendal James, a Portsmouth artist, was able to repair and restore damage on the computer files. She and Goff teamed up with the aim of getting Lawrence’s work and talent recognised. Together they have held successful exhibitions in and around Portsmouth where they live, and even had a piece on the BBC One Show.
However, Lawrence was a Nottingham man and it is very much a Nottingham story, so it has always been an ambition to bring his story and his work back to Nottingham. It is particularly fitting to have this exhibition here at Nottingham Trent University, as before Lawrence began his apprenticeship aged 16, he attended the Nottingham Municipal School Of Art. The school later became known as the Nottingham College of Art, which is now part of Nottingham Trent University.
Work by Lawrence Gleadle
Curated by Godfrey Gleadle
In collaboration with Kendal James