During the course of Performing Drawology, we documented the gallery as it developed with additions and changes being made by the artists in residence.
In residence this week: Joe Graham, Tuesday 2 – Wednesday 3 February; Andrew Pepper, Thursday 4 February; and Martin Lewis, Friday 5 February.
You can see even more photos on the Performing Drawology blog (run by artists and curators of the project, humhyphenhum). You can also explore more of Andrew Pepper’s work from his residency here.
Join us next week for the closing event to see the completion of the exhibition: Thursday 11 February, 5 pm – 8 pm. If you would like to attend, simply RSVP via email to confirm your attendance.
John Court will be the next artist in residence, before humhyphenhum return to the Gallery on the Thursday to bring the drawing process to a close.
Ahead of the opening of our next exhibition, Imprints of Culture: Block Printed Textiles of India, Aesthetica magazine caught up with curator, Eiluned Edwards to find out more about the process and history behind block printing in this in-depth interview…
Aesthetica: The block prints produce delicate and exuberant patterns, could you explain the technique behind this?
Eiluned Edwards: The technique of block printing is highly adaptable so the variety of styles is numerous and used to reflect regional identity, religious and social status, and gender. As links between the craft, fashion and home wares industries have been established, new designs have been introduced and traditional patterns adapted to suit the tastes of urban consumers. The blocks, made of hard wood such as teak and sisam, are engraved with the design – complex patterns using several colours require multiple blocks, which are used in a specific sequence to build up the design. The block is the vehicle that carries the mordant and dye pastes to the cloth: the printer dips the block in the paste tray and then stamps it firmly on the cloth – there is a musicality to the process and you can hear a good printer by the steady percussion of his printing (the craft is a predominantly male preserve). Printing stages are interspersed with dyeing. Some dyes in use require the cloth to be boiled in order to fix the colour – madder, a natural dye that produces red is typical of this process – other dyes are used cold; indigo is a good example. Until the late 19th century all block printers and dyers worked with natural dyes – the classic Indian dyes are indigo and madder. Nowadays, the majority of production is with synthetic dyes, which are cheaper and easier to use although there are environmental issues with some categories of dyestuffs – for example, naphthol dyes, still widely used in India, are banned in Europe because of their toxicity.
A: How does this form of printmaking contribute to the cultural and social make up of India?
EE: Until quite recently, block printed textiles were key components of caste dress, reflecting regional affiliation, occupational and religious identity, social and even economic status. The block printers came under the patronage of the Mughal Empire (1526-1857) as well as the royal courts of princely India, but they served many other social groups, too. Thus they have helped to shape the visual identity of India and played an important role in its material culture – a fact recognised by Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister after the country gained its independence in 1947. From the 1950s onward, Nehru’s government implemented a programme of craft revival in which block printing played an important role. Craft was seen as central to forging a national identity; it would also generate rural employment and revenue from exports. But the impact of block printing on global material culture should not be overlooked; painted and printed cottons were amongst the most important commodities exported from India from at least the medieval period until the 19th century. Chintz, considered an icon of ‘Britishness’, was actually introduced to the UK from India by the East India Company in the 17th century – a painted and printed cotton textile produced on the Coromandel Coast of South India, it transformed British (and European) fashions of the day. Similarly, the export of Indian block prints to East and Southeast Asia has had an enduring impact on the material culture of countries such as China, Japan, Thailand and Indonesia.
A: What are the fabrics typically used and fashioned for?
EE: Block prints have been produced for caste dress, courtly attire and for export – the artisans calibrated designs to suit the tastes of a highly diverse consumer base. Certain categories of block printed textiles have also had a ritual function – for example, mata ni pachedi (cloth of the mother goddess) still painted and printed by the Chitrakar community in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, is used by marginal groups such as Rabari nomads, and Chitrakars themselves in worship of the mother goddess, a heterodox expression of Hinduism.
Since the 1970s, there has been a growth in demand for block prints from the global fashion industry. They played a big part in shaping the ‘hippy chic’ aesthetic of the late 1960s and 1970s, and were prevalent in the boutiques of swinging London. More recently, block prints dyed with natural colours have become a feature of the global ‘slow clothes’ movement whose advocates have embraced their rich symbolism, eco-friendly production methods, and rootedness in specific local communities. Delhi-based designer Aneeth Arora, whose label Pero has established a global following for its hand-fashioned garments made from classic Indian textiles, has established an enduring relationship with block printers in Kachchh district, Gujarat. While much of her work has been at the level of couture, she has also designed a collection using ajrakh, a traditional block print worn by animal herders in Kachchh as caste dress, for Indian retail giant Westside, which flew off the racks in 2014. Another advocate of sustainable fashion, social entrepreneur Charlotte Kwon, runs Maiwa Handprints in Vancouver, Canada. A highly successful retail company, Maiwa has introduced Indian block prints to large parts of Canada and North America, an expanding market that supports hundreds of artisans in India.
A: Has the traditional technique allowed for much technical innovation, or has it remained largely unchanged?
EE: The technique is largely unchanged: the artisan still stamps the design on the cloth in the same way as his forebears did going back hundreds of years. There have been changes, however, to the dyes used. By the 1950s, synthetic dyes (naphthol, azo dyes, etc) had almost entirely replaced natural dyes; knowledge of a technology that dates back over 4,500 years in India was rapidly disappearing. The appeal of synthetic dyes lay in their ease of use, cheapness and vivid colours; in comparison, natural dyes are labour-intensive. But a few block printers became concerned that they were losing their traditions – a heritage that can be traced back to the late Harappan period (2500-1500 BCE) when South Asia’s earliest urban culture developed in the Indus Valley region. One such was Khatri Mohammad Siddik of Dhamadka village in Kachchh district, Gujarat, who resumed using natural dyes in the 1970s, and taught his sons techniques that went back at least nine generations in his family. They – Abdulrazzak, Ismail, and Abduljabbar Khatri – are now among India’s foremost block printers and dyers whose work not only reaches a global clientele but is also held in the collections of the V&A, the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, Musee Guimet, Paris, the Textiles Museum, Washington D.C, and the Calico Museum, Ahmedabad.
Imprints of Culture will be here at the Gallery from Friday 26 February – Thursday 24 March.
Here is a selection of posts by students commenting on our exhibition Publishing Rooms.
As a photography student at NTU, it is great to see an escape from the stereotypical, orderly space of an art gallery. Through the use of projections, scanners and the ability to interact with the technology in the room (allowing you to feature in the work itself), the space becomes more of an installation over the course of the exhibition. Even with this mechanical process of mass publishing, there is something very intimate about the images produced from the body scans specifically, more so than a piece of art done by hand.
You could propose that this practice is a style of photography and a medium that I have not previously considered using as a student. However, after experimenting with the devices and seeing the results, it is something that I am looking forward to exploring further.
Just come and take a look for yourself!
Adidas or Nothing – Reece Straw
Self Expression ≡ Brand Dedication ≡ Identity ≡ Community
Living in our post-internet world we are able to define our ‘unique’ identity though various outlets online and display them for the world to see: sharing an article of a cause close to us, an image of celebrity we admire, a piece of music. Not anything new by far, we have just exhibited ourselves on a smaller scale within a more immediate community before we had the technology to instantly share it with the world.
Interestingly, social media and branding has made us less original: we are pigeon-holed into ways of expression through proxies of design, the ‘sub-culture’ is dead. A ‘sub-culture’ brings people together of similar interests, a choice has to be made, the obvious being which side of the fence to sit on, dependant on which subject the community is built around e.g. Manchester United or Manchester City, loving or hating Kanye West, being a ‘Mod’ or a ‘Rocker’. This being an old model of society; black and white being the only way to define oneself, whereas the younger generations allow themselves to invest more in the grey area of this model to include themselves within multiple outlets without quarrel. The world is still catching up with this development as ‘sides’ do still exist and there is still something important about where our fundamental choices are made as they will define who we are, something to do with authenticity one expects as we value people who remain the ‘same’. Objects in the world now are very much culturally loaded and our immediate associations reveal the owners’ assumed interests and choices. And as all good evolution goes, as a species we buy into this as it benefits the development of community.
A classic example of this is the band t-shirt. It once meant that you were an avid fan of the band; if someone else was in the same band t-shirt you had an instant friend. But when a Guns ‘n’ Roses t-shirt is seen as a (low) fashion item in Topshop, the whole culture is boiled down into that single object, appropriated and removed by people who gauge it on the aesthetic alone or false inclusion by solely knowing ‘Sweet Child O’ Mine’ (as you can see, sides do still exist). Our inability to think that we can create something completely original due to our extended history of culture may be the reasoning for this endless recycling of culture. Just look at the current state of the film industry: endless superhero movies adapted from over 50 years of comic book characters from the 1940’s onward; reboots, remakes and re-releases (I’m looking at you, George Lucas). Even the new Star Wars: The Force Awakens is nostalgiagasm, trapped within itself and what its fans would only let it be or become.
On the flip side, the Adidas brand, who champion themselves on reinterpreting the past and being true to their roots doesn’t seem to have the same reputation as the re-releases of the original Star Wars trilogy. If anything, to see someone in the same shoes as yourself gives the indication that they ‘know what’s up’ or equally, you aren’t as original as you once thought you were. But that all depends on the choice that was made when purchasing the shoes: in personal preference or the idea that they in some way will change one’s presence.
The Adidas NMD in the image above, created using the technology in Publishing Rooms from Foxall Studio, is a rarity in today’s sneaker culture. To own these is to be recognised by those in the know, it brings the satisfaction of taming such a rare beast with resell values now double the price. Although nothing on the Yeezy Boost range it still means something culturally: these shoes are noticed, and not just for the 4 or 5 logos on the actual shoe.
So where does this leave us? In a world saturated with everything our choices are evermore important if we care about how people view us, because as insincere and shallow as it is, the reality of the situation is that if you aren’t ‘on fleek‘ in one way or another you may be passed by. This unfortunate event in society – only caring about surface value – is tragic, but you can’t deny that you have (at one point or another) judged someone at face value. It’s instinctive, and in my opinion benefits the development of society.
‘You’d be sick if you saw my Adidas collection…you would be physically sick if you saw it. I’m not gonna say where it is.’
Ian Brown
A Student review of our exhibition Publishing Rooms from a second year BA Fine Art Student, Dominique Phizacklea
A topic of late in the studios is the idea of originality. The “I thought of it first”, or “did you know so and so is also making XY and Z in the same way I am?!”
Sitting here in the Gallery I once again hear this conversation; “turning scanners into engineered cameras has been done before, it’s not new or original”. I find all of this thought odd.
For a start artists are thieves, we all know this. That is as old as time. We steal what’s around us, pop it in the blender that is our minds and reform it. The same but new. It can’t not be new, because someone has added their interpretation. Even an ‘exact’ copy of a clay pot, made by hand will never be an exact copy, even if it’s very close. Different fingerprints will exist within the clay. The same but different. Modern technology gets us close, but we all know that faint greying caused by a photocopier or the cold starkness of mass production.
Going back to the studio, I am not surprised similar work is being produced. We are all feeding from similar (if not the same) troughs. Nottingham is after all a city, a concentration of humanness with all the things that go along with that. We are sharing the same culture, we see the same art on a daily basis. We have the same tutors. We all ‘eat’ the same, washing it down by being surrounded with each other’s ideas constantly. Similar conclusions will be drawn and similar problems faced, followed by similar solutions. I would be surprised in a course of nearly 300 students, having access to the same facilities, the same local culture and being all mixed together, if 300 completely different practices were born with 300 completely original works being produced, which didn’t even reference the work of another, just slightly.
Yeah maybe, maybe scanners have been turned in to rudimentary cameras before. Yeah maybe they have been set up in a gallery before. But never in this gallery, never in this arrangement by these artists, Andrew and Ian Foxall, from Foxall studios. Never being experienced by this exact group of people. Never with the same references behind the idea. Never with these exact scanner models, or even these exact machines (allowing for the minute differences between each resulting from teeny tiny differences in part placements). Never with the same coding, as the coding has been developed specifically for the exhibition, and is changed and becoming more efficient as the show goes on.
This exhibition is unique, and will never happen again in the same way. The idea is timeless, fed from history, pop culture and social etiquette. From technological advancement and human behaviour.
Am I saying the ideas used to make Publishing Rooms are new and never before seen? No. Am I saying they will never appear in art again? No.
I think it is not possible, or at least very rare, to have these sought after completely new ideas. In my opinion that’s just not how we learn. We build upon the work of others, the knowledge of others and each time add that next layer of thought, of research, of experience. What is new? Can anything be new? When we say we have something new, usually what we mean is it is new to us.
This exhibition is interactive, allowing you the opportunity to add to the website, creating an ever-expanding collection of faces – some of which are even added in to the room, changing the backdrop, evolving it as much as the changing code. If you want to add the experience of this exhibition (and I thoroughly recommend it) to your own brain blender then come and see it for yourself. It will be up in Bonington Gallery until the 20th of May.
Earlier this month, Tom caught up with Experience Nottinghamshire to talk about the Nottingham Art Map; what it is, how it came into being, and why it’s needed in a city like ours.
“Having an Art Map in the city now feels like a matter of course. Over the past 10 years, the independent and institutional art sector has grown exponentially… Nottingham is highly acclaimed as a major contributor to national & international cultural discourse, and it only seems fitting that visitors to the city should be able to engage with all that’s happening in as clear and direct a way possible.”
Read the full feature here, and if you haven’t already, check out the Nottingham Art Map to see what’s on.
You can also pick up your own printed copy from the Nottingham Tourism Centre or from arts venues and cafés across the city.
Trying to reduce our ‘RT’ by building acoustic panels in the gallery this week:
This months Frieze magazine features a great article by Jonathan P.Watts (NTU Lecturer, writer, critic) examining how gentrification in London is impacting upon the lives of artists who live and worth there. The article uses Nottingham (& Norwich’s) burgeoning artist-led communities as examples of how critically engaged and sustainable practices can establish themselves away from ‘major’ cities. The article uses several specific examples including The Midland Group, Stand Assembly (now One Thoresby Street), Primary, TG & Tyson, and the ever vital Outpost Gallery in Norwich.
This article accompanies a recent Frieze commissioned film of the same title that can be watched here.
You can keep updated and get an overview of artistic activity in the city via the Nottingham Art Map.
Listen and you’ll see: Work by Peter Wright, 2015
Images dominate. Visual representation has a power which goes largely unchallenged in contemporary culture. The ability to pause time and repeat the moment for eternity is a strength of the photographic image which raises the visual above all other senses when we attempt to represent the world around us.
‘Listen and you’ll see’ is an attempt to add another sense to the equation. By recording a minute of sound at the same time as capturing the fraction of a visual second, Peter hopes to draw attention to what is ordinarily missing from our re-presentation of the world and our memories of it. Through repetition of the sound loop we can hear the rhythms of these scenes as well as see them.
This little experiment also presents an opportunity to go back-to-basics in our appreciation of the still photographic image and re-engage with the elements which made it so powerful in the first place.
You can watch the full piece here
Congratulations to Tim Saunders, whose entry was chosen as the overall winner by Alan Kitching!
Tim’s monogram was chosen by Alan “because it seems to be more in keeping with the spirit of the original concept, and is the simplest and the most interesting from the use of colour and textures.”
Tim, a Year Two BA (Hons) Graphic Design student, said “it was such an honour to be part of the project!”, and as his prize for winning the competition he chose a limited edition print of Alan Kitching’s Abram Games monogram.
Two runners-up were also selected to win some Monotype goodies:
#NTUMonogram runner-up entries: Jasmin Watts (L) and Wen Yee Kok (R)
Reflecting on the competition, Alan Kitching said “All have a very nice use of combination of the individual letters. The overall response to the competition was very encouraging and all entries had something worthy.”
On behalf of Alan Kitching, Monotype and the School of Art & Design at Nottingham Trent University, thank you to all who entered the competition – it was great to see so many creative entries appearing on the social media wall!
If you missed out on the competition or the Alan Kitching and Monotype exhibition, why not join the mailing list to be kept in the loop with news and upcoming events from the Gallery?
have shaped its position within the city of Nottingham as a leading exponent of innovative exhibition practice.”
Read all about our autumn season of exhibitions and find out more about the Gallery over on Aesthetica Magazine’s website
Something very Roman Signer about the new coffee van here…
