This touring exhibition created by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in collaboration with the Society of British Theatre Designers celebrated the work of over 30 of the most pioneering British theatre designers, architects and artists.
Transformation & Revelation featured drawings, photographs, scale models and costumes, as well as sound, lighting and multi-media installations.
Highlights included Rae Smith’s digital projections in the National Theatre’s West End production of War Horse (2007); Antony Gormley’s creative process for the dance work Sutra produced by Sadler’s Wells (2008) and photographs and models of Es Devlin’s designs for Lady Gaga’s Monsterball tour (2009–2010).
For details of exhibitors please visit the Transformation & Revelation webpages.
Delivered by Dance4, Nottdance Festival returned once more with its internationally renowned innovative and entertaining perspective that continues to question ‘What can dance be?
Bonington Gallery was proud to host a number of performances in our Waverley theatre and a photography exhibition A Dance4 Story by David Severn.
This series of photographs were commissioned by Dance4 to take a look behind the scenes and create a visual narrative about the work the organisation does with artists, communities, young people and venues. The project also explored Dance4 in the context of Nottingham and demonstrates its dedication to the city and wider region.
A DANCE4 STORY by DAVID SEVERN (UK)
This series of photographs was commissioned by Dance4 to take a look behind the scenes and create a visual narrative about the work the organisation does with artists, communities, young people and venues. The project also explores Dance4 in the context of Nottingham and demonstrates its dedication to the city and the wider region.
David Severn is a social documentary and fine art photographer, based in Nottingham. His photographs have been exhibited at QUAD (Derby), Light House (Wolverhampton), Guernsey Photography Festival, London Film Museum and Nottingham Castle. Photographs from his project Thanks Maggie (2012) are currently on exhibition at the FORMAT International Photography Festival (Derby). He is a finalist in the Magnum Photos/Ideas Tap award and won Grand Prize at the Nottingham Castle Annual Open last year.
“I have a strong relationship with Dance4 and have been photographing performances for them as a commercial photographer for several years. After knowing the organisation for so long and feeling part of the team, I wanted to make a series of photographs that looked more contemplatively at the great work they do with international artists, young talented dancers and local community groups. My work is typically concerned with the connection between people land place. I’m particularly interested in photographing my home city of Nottingham and the surrounding county, so this project was a way of bringing my own curiosities as a photographer to a commission I could develop over a sustained period of time. It’s been a privilege to once again work closely with Dance4 to make this work and l’d like to extend a warm thanks to the whole team for allowing me such creative freedom.”
David Severn
Opening up a space for the ear and the voice, Ear to Ear offered an invitation to its audience to become immersed in sonic space. It challenged the dominance of the visual in both the world of contemporary art and the modern day art and design school.
This exhibition featured immersive sound works by Robert Squirrell and Thomas Hall as well as a collection of playbacks and screenings curated by Rob Flint, on behalf of the Listening Group*.
Hypnotic and enchanting Sirens is an immersive aural and visual experience, resonating the allure and seductiveness of the mythical sea deities. Enticed into the installation by an ever changing musical arrangement of voices the viewer is surrounded by imposing sculptural forms, evoking impressions of being trapped in the hull of a boat or caught in the clutches of a pair of hands. Each experience is unique to the individual viewer.
An interactive sound installation in the form of a spiral maze exploring ideas related to the Large Hadron Collider – CERN, particle physics, circularity and what it might sound like. Curious about our understanding of the universe, the work sonically explores a physical experience of play in an immersive surround sound environment.
Thomas Hall and Robert Squirrell are both members of Engagement Party, an artist led group working individually and collectively with notions of active engagement, interaction and play.
*Listening Group is an informal meeting of students and staff. It is intended to be a place for focusing attention to art-works that foreground sound and active listening.
This exhibition brought together two artists that investigate their own subjectivity in relation to socio-political economies and corporeal boundaries. Through differing approaches each artist created a shared language through mired and inky surfaces on skin and paper. By exhibiting solo works together Kelly and Marhaug grappled to hold each other in view and create the context to embark on a collaborative project, whilst Kelly was in residency at USF Verftet, Bergen (April-June 2013).
The Seers-in Residence was a programme which engaged four researchers from Nottingham Trent University, drawn from across various departments and schools. The researchers were invited to interact with Traci Kelly’s mono print installation Feeling It For You (Perspective) to evoke their own practice and research interests.
Emma Cocker, School of Art & Design
Thursday 10 January, 10 am – 1 pm
Emma Cocker’s practice interrogates the critical potential of failure, uncertainty, boredom, hesitation, immobility and inconsistency by exploring models of practice and subjectivity that remain wilfully open or unresolved.
Joanne Lee, School of Art & Design
Thursday 17 January, 10 am – 1 pm
Joanne Lee investigates the aesthetics of everyday urban life and explores the possibilities of the essay in textual and visual forms as a creative and critical entity.
Ben Judd, School of Art & Design
Wednesday 23 January, 2 pm – 5 pm
Ben Judd interacts with and creates alternative belief systems based on observations of social groups such as witches and Morris dancers, to which he remains paradoxically both close and distant, connected and disconnected.
Dr Simon Cross, School of Arts and Humanities
Thursday 31 January 10 am – 1 pm
Simon Cross’ research engages with the representation and attending imagery of madness in the social sphere through historical and contemporary trajectories.
Our first exhibition of 2018 is a solo presentation of new work by London-based and Nottingham-originated artist Ruth Angel Edwards. This follows her contribution to our 2016 group exhibition Terraformers, curated by Landfill Editions.
A new commission for Bonington Gallery, this immersive installation considers the inescapable cycles of waste and decay, a by-product of all our consumption, personal or material.
The exhibition explores how these ecologies overlap at different scales – from the futile pursuit of personal purification and ‘clean living’, to the increasingly rapid turnover of cultural ‘content’ in the media and popular consciousness, to the wider perspective of the waste which is polluting our oceans, and threatening our very existence.
Edwards studied Fine Art at Central Saint Martins. Recent exhibitions and projects include Enema Salvatore! , Almanac, Turin, 2017; Light Deception / The Great Imitator, Auto Italia South East, London, 2017; a solo exhibition at Arcadia Missa, London, 2016; Info Pura, The Residence Gallery, London 2016, Derivatives and Futures, Human Resources, Los Angeles, 2016; A British Art Show, MEYOHAS, New York, 2015.
Associated Events
Thursday 25 January, 5.15 pm – 7.30 pm: Fine Art Live Lecture Present: Ruth Angel Edwards
Lecture Theatre 2, Newton building, NTU City Campus
Saturday 3 February, 1 pm – 2 pm (postponed) Ruth Angel Edwards: premier of new video work
Bonington Gallery
Bonington Gallery was delighted to present Publishing Rooms, a commissioned exhibition concept by Andrew and Iain Foxall of Foxall Studio, London.
Over the past decade, mass-publishing has moved from the print houses into the hands of anyone owning a smartphone. Publishing is no longer a privilege, but an involuntary expression of our multiple identities and allegiances.
Exploring themes of self-expression and posterity, Bonington Gallery became a facility for self-publishing.
Set within a constructed environment that combines the appearance of an abstracted newsroom with the functionality of a photo booth, visitors were invited to interact with technological and analogue devices designed and implemented by Foxall. These tools for self-publishing will provide opportunity to further explore our obsessions with mediated forms of self-expression.
Referencing and subverting everything from zine culture to the selfie phenomenon, Publishing Rooms provided opportunities to go beyond the prescribed presets found in our social media outlets, generating new variables for the production of self-imagery and the subjective understanding of ourselves.
Referencing and subverting everything from zine culture to the selfie phenomenon, Publishing Rooms provided opportunities to go beyond the prescribed presets found in our social media outlets, generating new variables for the production of self-imagery and the subjective understanding of ourselves.
Brothers Andrew and Iain started Foxall Studio in 2006 to combine their experience and vision in art, fashion and innovation. As a multi-disciplinary studio, Foxall direct brand-led experiences ranging from brand creation, art direction and magazine design, through to exhibition design.
The brothers work with designers, developers, photographers and artists to create collaborations that challenge the paradigms of brand / experience building. Recent projects include a commissioned brand campaign by British jewellery designer, Jo Hayes Ward; contributions to an installation for Selfridges, London; and a music film released exclusively on Nowness.
Andrew and Iain also regularly lecture and run workshops at The British Council, London College of Communication, The Royal College of Art and Liverpool John Moores.
All the images created within Publishing Rooms were published directly to publishingrooms.com. Here, you can view and save your scanner camera portraits, and view the most recent images made using the Body Scan and Wall Scanner installations. From there, you can also share these elsewhere on the web, with the ability to share them directly to social media platforms. Tag your posts #PublishingRooms on Instagram and Twitter and share your exhibition experience with us.
Our Gallery invigilators and Foxall Studios’ intern Marion will also be kept us up-to-date with the exhibition via the blog. In case you missed it, you can read Andrew and Iain’s introduction to the project and get an early look at the scanner camera development here.
An informal discussion looking at the changing importance of printed matter and whether it still holds up as a relevant and vital contemporary media format. This will take place on 26th April, 1 pm, in the gallery space.
Guest Speakers:
Matt Gill (Raw Print), Andrew Foxall (Foxall Studio), Iain Foxall (Foxall Studio), Hugh Frost (Landfill Editions), Alex Smith (Ideas on Paper), chaired by Tom Godfrey
This exhibition was open as part of the Nottingham Art Weekender on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 May 2016, where many of the venues listed on the Nottingham Art Map invited the public to take part in their events and exhibitions in a celebration of the visual arts scene in Nottingham.
The Accumulation of Things brings together seven artists whose work deals with shared interests of experience, circumstance and the familiar. Personal histories, both real and imagined, are examined through painting, photography and sculpture.
Aditya Babbar’s photographs capture the complexities of interpersonal relationships by the creation of meticulously directed portraits. His compositions are littered with evidence, from the decor to the posture of the subjects, all the while suggesting at a possible narrative beyond the picture.
Stories, or snippets of stories are told through the language of painting and drawing by Joe Bloom. He invites the viewer to use elements presented before them, together with their own interpretation and experiences, to make decisions on the connotations of the composition.
Photographer Julie Greve’s work takes the form of portraits and staged visual scenarios made in collaboration with groups of girls. Born and raised in a small town in Denmark, a lot of Julie’s work focuses on the areas in which she grew up.
Alicia Jalloul’s sculptures address the paradoxes that exist with the crossing between cultures, whilst Joy Labinjo draws on her British-Nigerian heritage, inviting the viewer to step into preliminary drawings saturated with colours, patterns and people, reconfigured from her family photograph albums.
Evie O’Connor explores class and identify in her works, and her textiles background has heavily informed the stylistic and decorative qualities within her work. She imagines both a beautiful and droll environment, explored through familiar domestic environments. Max Prus produces figurative drawings and paintings, telling stories with complex narratives representing culture and society.
Exhibition curated by Adam Murray. Adam is a lecturer, photographer and curator based in Manchester. He is co-founder of photography collective Preston is my Paris, and most recently he co-curated North: Fashioning Identity with Lou Stoppard at Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool and Somerset House, London.
Special thanks goes to John A Stephens Ltd. for supplying materials for this exhibition.
Join us for a free, online film screening on YouTube curated by artists Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes.
What You Could Have Won is a contemporary interpretation of chaos, where relics from childhood return to destabilise our notions of reality. The online screening evokes spirits from the past, exploring subconscious energies that lie in the underbellies of power and popular culture. Artists’ works are combined with other video fragments, a drift through cartoonish cynics, unblinking zombie cultures and folkloric futures.
This screening was curated for South London Gallery and is a repeat showing.
The screening includes works by Karen Kilimnik, Jennifer Martin, Chloée Maugile, Chris Michael, and Andrew
Norman Wilson.
One work includes explicit sexual content, suitable for audiences 18+
Mr Blobby Goes Shopping (Extract, sound design by Saul Rivers at CODA): 1 min 40 sec
Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes, Nativity Part 1, 2016, Mini DV transferred to digital: 3 min 12 sec
Hate to Love (Extract): 1 min
Sunset Beach (Extract): 55 sec
Andrew Norman Wilson, In the Air Tonight, 2020, HD video, colour, sound: 8 min
Karen Kilimnik, Kate Moss at the Beginning, 1996, VHS transferred to HD file: 7 min (Courtesy of the artist and Sprüth Magers Gallery)
Jennifer Martin, Channel 6, 2019, HD video, colour, sound: 7 min 30 sec
Chris Michael, In Your Room, 2019, HD video, colour, sound, 2019: 6 min
Chloée Maugile, At Dawn: Good Manners To Look Good, 2020, 16mm transferred to HD file: 5 min 7 sec (With special thanks to Charlie Hope, Hatty Coward and Nadia Correia for lighting donation)
Sophie Cundale and Ben Gomes, Nativity Part 2, 2016, Mini DV transferred to digital: 11 min
Sophie Cundale (b. 1987) is an artist living and working in London. Previous work has been commissioned by Serpentine Galleries and the South London Gallery; screened at Temporary Gallery, Cologne; Spike Island, Bristol; Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand; Catalyst Arts, AMINI festival, Belfast; VCD festival, Beijing and Innsbruck Biennale, Austria; and hosted on vdrome.org. The Near Room at the South London Gallery is her first major solo exhibition, and travels in November 2020 to Bonington Gallery, Nottingham.
Ben Gomes (b. 1989) is an artist living and working in London. His work includes painting, performance and writing. Recent exhibitions include Get Out of My Office curated by Daniel Neofetou and The Painting Show at All Hallows Church curated by Ruth Angel Edwards. Recent collaborations with Adam Gallagher have been exhibited at Lima Zulu and Auto Italia.
Karen Kilimnik (b.1955) has diverse practice that draws upon the tradition of Romantic painting, and utilises painting, drawing, collage, photography, video and installation to produce nuanced and playful observations of historical codes and symbols. Revelling in both mass and high culture, George Stubbs, Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the ballet are as important for Kilimnik as The Avengers, Kate Moss and pop music, forcing such distinctions to collapse into her own specific mélange of cultural influence and production.
Jennifer Martin (b. 1990) is an artist-filmmaker living and working in London. Recent solo exhibitions and commissions include TEETH, Primary, Nottingham; Channel 6, Turf Projects, London; and Britain Been Rotten, Cypher Billboards, London. She has screened work in the UK and abroad at Art Licks Weekend, London; 36 Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel; B3 Biennial, Frankfurt; and European Media and Art Festival 32, Osnabrück. Martin is a co-director of the artist workers’ cooperative not/nowhere, which is run by black artists and artists of colour and focuses on photochemical film, audio, and digital practices.
Since 2017 Chloée Maugile has written and directed plays and short films for institutions such as The V&A, The Young Vic and The Block. She graduated from Slade School of Art in 2019 and currently lives and works in London. Maugile will be premiering a new work, ‘At Dawn: Good Manners To Look Good’, a short film featuring Anthony Gopaul, Dumas Maugile and Thom Murphy. Directed by Chloée Maugile, filmed by Nina Porter, styled by Thom Murphy and soundtrack created by Conrad Pack.
Artist and researcher Chris Michael lives and works in London and Basildon, UK. Michael engages with ideas orbiting pop-culture, class, nostalgia, fanaticism, desire, transformation, longing & labour. His work has been exhibited and screened internationally at institutions such as the Chisenhale, Whitechapel Gallery, Barbican and Southwark Park Galleries and has worked alongside and spoken at South London Gallery, The Woodmill, UAL and Newham Council among others. Michael is currently a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art on MA Visual Communication.
Andrew Norman Wilson (b.1983) is an artist and curator based between Europe and the United States. Recent exhibitions include Hirngespenster at the Kunstverein Braunschweig in 2019 (solo), Picture Industry at Luma Arles in 2018, Dreamlands at the Whitney Museum in 2017, and the Gwangju Biennial in 2016.
Bonington Gallery is pleased to present The Near Room (2020), a new moving-image work by the artist Sophie Cundale (b.1987).
The Near Room is a supernatural melodrama about loss that follows the journey of a professional boxer after a near-fatal knockout. The boxer’s disorientations become entangled with the story of a queen living with Cotard delusion, a rare neurological condition inducing the belief in and sensation of death.
The film’s title is taken from the boxer Muhammad Ali’s description of a vivid, hallucinatory space he would enter when in the depths of a fight – “A door swung half open [into a room of] neon, orange and green lights blinking, bats blowing trumpets and alligators playing trombones, snakes screaming. Weird masks and actors’ clothes hung on the wall, and if he stepped across the sill and reached for them, he knew that he was committing himself to his own destruction.” – George Plimpton, Shadow Box (1977).
The boxing scenes were filmed at long established south London boxing club, Lynn AC in Camberwell. The cast includes professional boxer John Harding Jnr., artist Penny Goring, and actor Chris New.
The Near Room is commissioned and produced by Film and Video Umbrella with support from Arts Council England, South London Gallery, Bonington Gallery, Curator Space and The Gane Trust. The film premiered at South London Gallery in April 2020 and due to COVID-19 was extended until September 2020.
Sophie Cundale (b.1987) lives and works in London. Her work has previously been commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries and the South London Gallery; screened at Temporary Gallery, Cologne; Spike Island, Bristol; Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Zealand; Catalyst Arts and Amini festival, Belfast; VCD festival, Beijing and Innsbruck Biennale, Austria; and hosted on vdrome.org. Cundale’s latest film The Near Room opened at South London Gallery in April 2020 and travels to Bonington Gallery, Nottingham in October 2020.
Running time: 32 mins.
Please be aware that this film includes moments of violence and blood, as well as sexual references which some viewers may find offensive and unsuitable for children.
The Near Room will also be available to view online every Sunday during the exhibition.
In response to the COVID-19 crisis, we are currently adapting this exhibition to a new format and will release more information soon. Please check back soon for updates.
The exhibition will continue to be an open call, with new submission requirements to be confirmed.
Bonington Gallery is pleased to be presenting The Captive Conscious, a collection of visual responses to an open call led by our Student Curatorial Group. Creative practitioners from within Nottingham Trent University and beyond are invited to respond in any medium to a piece of writing composed of redacted appropriated texts. The text has been cut, merged, edited and reassembled to form a new piece of writing that can be opened up to interpretation – in response to an imaginary narrative. The Captive Conscious will present an observation of the minds of many, encouraging a truly organic response to language.