Lace Unarchived brings together a diverse group of designers and artists from across the UK who have each interpreted Nottingham lace in a unique and contemporary way.
The exhibition includes lengths of contemporary lace by multi award-winning and nationally acclaimed textile designers Timorous Beasties. Light emitting fabrics — inspired by Nottingham lace technologies from Sarah Taylor, Senior Research Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University and Sara Robertson,Tutor at the Royal College of Art — will also feature in the show.
On display is a complete final collection and unseen development work by high-street women’s fashion brand Oasis. Telling the story of Nottingham lace, Oasis have reimagined some of the 75,000 antique lace samples housed in the Lace Archive at Nottingham Trent University. The collection also features a garment by Final Year BA (Hons) Fashion Design student Robert Goddard.
The exhibition will also include works by Mal Burkinshaw, Programme Director of Fashion at the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with Sophie Hallette Lace; filmmaker Matthew Woodham; and artist James Winnett, all of which will be presented alongside samples of machine-made lace dating back to the early 1800s.
Invited for the diversity of their work, the contributors have all studied the intricacies of Nottingham lace and its technology to create pieces that not only celebrates the rich heritage of lace, but also preserves its place in contemporary design for the future.
Visit our blog to read more about the exhibiting artists and the history of the Lace Archive.
Friday 23 February 2018: Light Night
This exhibition is just one of many activities by NTU for Light Night 2018.
Thursday 15 and Friday 16 March 2018: Lace Unravelled Symposium
The Lace Unravelled symposium marks the conclusion of an 18-month research project, exploring Nottingham City Museums and Galleries’ world-class collection of lace and lace machinery.
Saturday 17 March 2018 (booking required): Nottingham Trent University Lace Archive Tours (sold out)
Lace Unravelled is made possible by Arts Council England Designation Development funding.
Download the exhibition handout here
Alan Lodge, Nottingham Trent University (NTU) BA and MA Photography alumnus, comes from a free festival and traveller background. Living in old buses, trucks and caravans, he drove around the country on ‘the circuit’ with his family and friends. Since the late 1970s he has been photographing events and the people around him.
Documenting all aspects of alternative lifestyles and sub-cultures, Alan has photographed many free and commercial events, environment protests, land rights demonstrations, and rave culture. Providing insight that only people who have been accepted into a community can really achieve, his aim has been to present a more positive view of people and communities that are frequently misrepresented.
The process has not been easy, as many people are suspicious of anyone with a camera and their motives. Conflict with the police in more recent years has become a fact of life, as has eviction from land and squats, and difficulties with children’s education when being continually moved on.
Alan had produced work for publications, galleries, events, and public spaces. Moving beyond photography, he has experimented with mixed media involving printed and projected text. During his MA at NTU, Alan specialised in issues surrounding representation, presenting himself in print and audio-visual format. A member of the National Union of Journalists, he is a documentary photographer, a photo-journalist and ‘storyteller’ always on the lookout for another tale to tell.
Archivist Dan Heather, curator of the current Bonington Vitrines exhibition Communicating the Contemporary – The ICA Bulletin 1950s to 1990s, will be joining us on Saturday 17 February to discuss the role of the archivist and the value of archives in the contemporary arts.
The talk will examine the place of archives in exhibition making, following the so-called ‘archival turn’ in cultural production; the relationship between the archivist, curator and artist (including the artist-as-archivist); and the growth of art galleries, museums and cultural bodies engaging with their own archive collections to examine and re-evaluate their history.
The talk will also explore alternative approaches to archives and archiving, looking at radical and disruptive ideas around collecting and managing archive material and the value of archives not only as objects for historical enquiry, but as a generative source for new activity.
Dan Heather is currently the Deputy Archivist for Barts Health, an NHS Trust which manages archives and museum objects covering almost 900 years of healthcare and medicine in East London. He was previously the archivist at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). He has also worked as an archivist in higher education, managing the records of Hornsey College of Art, and in architecture, at Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners.
In collaboration with the NTU Fine Art Live Lecture programme, Bonington Film Night #8 will take the form of a short introduction by writer and curator Amy Budd, followed by a curated selection of films that she has entitled Dirty Pictures.
Dirty Pictures comprises a selection of historic and contemporary diary films, together with examples of surveying films and videos that are explicitly diaristic. Also included are a selection of moving-image works that are more ambiguous. Both personal and expressive in their means of production, they display radical forms of new image-making through poetic renderings of individual observations, memories and reflections.
Amy Budd is a curator and writer based in London. Since 2014 she has been in the role of Exhibitions Organiser and Deputy Director at Raven Row, London. During this time she has curated exhibitions including: 56 Artillery Lane, 2017, co-curated with Naomi Pearce; Machine Vision: Steina and Woody Vasulka, 2016; and Speaking Parts, 2015. She has previously worked at Chisenhale Gallery and was steering committee chair of OUTPOST Gallery, Norwich from 2010-13.
Her writings have been published by Art Monthly, Afterall, This Is Tomorrow, and Kaleidoscope. She curated the screening programme I See It Feelingly for Parallel: ICO Art + Cinema Weekend at Arnolfini, Bristol in 2016, and was Writer-in-Residence for LUX Moving Image Biennial in 2012.
Nottingham Trent University is delighted to invite Ruth Angel Edwards to speak as part of the 2017 Fine Art Live Lecture Series.
Edwards is a multimedia artist whose work explores the communication of ideology through popular culture. Drawing from mainstream and subcultural youth movements from the past and present, Edwards looks at the way audio and visual content is used to manipulate an audience and disseminate information.
Working between video, audio, sculpture, performance and print, Edwards explores subcultures, tracing their paths and examining the wider socio-economic environments that give rise to them, exposing their failures and flaws and uncovering lost spiritualities and hidden positive potential.
This live lecture coincides with Edwards’ solo exhibition Wheel of the Year – ! Effluent Profundel Zone ! which is showing in Bonington Gallery until Friday 16 February 2018. 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.
Ruth Angel Edwards is a Nottingham born multimedia artist based in London. Her recent exhibitions include: Enema Salvatore! Almanac, Turin, 2017; Light Deception / The Great Imitator, Auto Italia South East, London, 2017; 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.
A selection of images from the opening of Ruth Angel Edwards: Wheel of the Year ! Effulent Profundal Zone !
Founded in 1946, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London is a membership organisation that seeks to promote an understanding of radical arts and culture. The ICA bulletin has always been instrumental in communicating a multi-disciplinary programme that encompasses music, film, talks, poetry, visual arts and performance to its audience.
The earliest 1950s bulletins function as a simple notice to inform its readership of the ICA’s activities. The uniform visual identity of these early bulletins is partly shaped by the ICA’s conception of itself as an ‘institute’, an organisation whose ethos was equally beholden to the ideas of the laboratory, the university and the professional society, as it was to the modern art gallery or museum.
In the 1960s the bulletin adopted a magazine format, where the listings were supplemented by articles exploring contemporary poetry, music and visual art, alongside critical writings, reviews and polemic. In bringing together these different disciplines, the bulletin evoked in print the interdisciplinary aims of the ICA, and the diverse programming that took place within the gallery space itself. Casting off its 1950s consistency, the bulletin adopts what CHK Design Director, Christian Küsters described as a ‘non-identity’ that characterised the ICA’s representation of self: simultaneously indebted to the self-publishing endeavours of artists, the poetry chapbook and the zine.
Subsequent decades saw the collage-indebted style of the 1960s give way to a muted colour palette and a rationalised identity. These changes culminated in the creation of a new logotype in the 1980s and the subsequent adoption of a new typeface and branding by acclaimed designer Tony Arefin (1962-2000) in the 1990s.
Following a series of re-designs the ICA bulletin has more recently become an online platform. Bringing together event listings with articles and projects conceived by ICA staff, collaborators, students and artists it has retained the characteristic sense of mutability that has typified the bulletin since its inception.
Curated by Daniel Heather.
Here is a selection of news articles from our exhibition Its’ Our Playground: Artificial Sensibility, and a selection of posts from our instagram page on the installation from the show.
It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on KubaParis, October 2017.
Lila Matsumoto’s ‘ekphrastic response’ to It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on MAP, October 2017.
It’s Our Playground Artificial Sensibility featured on thisistomorrow, October 2017.
In the past nine years, Sara MacKillop has published and self-published over 30 book-works. Printed matter has always been at the core of MacKillop’s artistic practice, working directly with the physical form of books and employing reprographic techniques to create her expanded installation works.
MacKillop is a strong supporter of wider independent publishing, demonstrated by her founding of the Artist Self Publishers’ Fair in 2015 at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in London with fellow artist Dan Mitchell, which has continued as an annual event at ICA.
This vitrine exhibition compliments Sara MacKillop’s solo exhibition One Room Living in the Gallery from Friday 3 November – Friday 8 December, whereby she will present a series of works, objects and interactions that make reference to areas within the University that cater for social and recreational activity.
This exhibition is supported by the Elephant Trust.
We are pleased to present Sara MacKillop’s first UK institutional solo exhibition since 2010.
One Room Living takes as its starting point the spaces within Nottingham Trent University that cater for leisure and recreational activity. By appropriating the motifs of art supplies, vending machines and spatial furnishing, MacKillop presents a series of works and interactions that reference the wide variety of spatial uses that directly surround Bonington Gallery – analysing not only the gallery’s site and situation, but also how the wider institution’s function is represented across a multitude of spaces.
Accompanying the exhibition is a display of MacKillop’s wide array of published and self-published printed matter, produced across a nine-year period, housed within the vitrine cases in the gallery foyer.
This exhibition is supported by the Elephant Trust.
Sara MacKillop is an artist living and working in London. She studied at the Royal College of Art, London, from 1999 to 2001. Recent solo exhibitions include Window Display, Haus der Kunst Munich, 2016; Temporary Bond, Clages, Cologne, 2016; Sculpture Room, Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Trondheim, 2014; Post, Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, 2013.