A photographic exhibition focusing on the region’s art schools, and the vital role that they play in the cultural life of our cities.
This exhibition is the latest iteration of John Beck and Matthew Cornford’s ambitious Art School Project, to track down and document all of the UK’s art schools – including the iconic Waverley building at Nottingham Trent University.
Featuring new photographic work depicting all the art school buildings of the East Midlands, or the sites upon which they stood, the exhibition raises questions about the role of the arts in relation to education, community and history and offers a space to reflect on what the future may hold for cultural institutions in our towns and cities.
There will also be a programme of public events exploring the themes of the exhibition, that will be announced soon. In our foyer space, our Vitrines exhibition, Art [School] Histories will present materials dedicated to the history and future of the Nottingham School of Art & Design here at NTU.
Launch event
Come along to our launch night on Thursday 21 September, 6 pm – 8 pm for a first look round the exhibition. Book your free tickets
Photographs by Jules Lister
The twin Victorian engines of industrial ambition and social reform powered the British art school system, set up to deliver a skilled labour force for local industry – such as lace manufacture in Nottingham the few original art school buildings still actively used for teaching art and much needed educational opportunities to the newly enfranchised working class. Art schools combined practical training and exposure to culture, turning out skilled producers and discerning consumers well into the twentieth century.
By the mid-1960s there were still over 150 art schools in the UK, and ‘art school’ became a journalistic shorthand for creative innovation across arts, design, music and advertising. Yet at the peak of their influence on British cultural life, art schools in many towns and cities were already being amalgamated, reorganised and rebranded as part of a drive to reshape education in the arts. Most art schools have long since been absorbed into larger institutions or faded away.
Bonington Gallery’s presentation focuses on the art schools of the East Midlands and features original photographic images of all the region’s art school buildings alongside displays of archival material. The striking grandeur of Derby School of Art’s Gothic Revival building currently stands empty, whilst the Waverley Building, home to the Nottingham School of Art & Design, remains one of the few original art school buildings still actively used for teaching art – as part of Nottingham Trent University. The project is also, importantly, an investigation of our present moment, documenting the sites of former art schools which have been redeveloped or reused.
John Beck and Matthew Cornford studied at Great Yarmouth College of Art and Design (now social housing) in the early 1980s and have served time, as students and members of staff, in colleges and universities across the country. John currently teaches literature and visual culture at the University of Westminster (incorporating what was once Harrow School of Art), and Matthew teaches fine art the University of Brighton (formerly Brighton School of Art).
Their photographic survey of the art schools of the North West was exhibited at Liverpool Bluecoat (2018), Bury Art Museum (2019) and Rochdale Touchstones (2021). Recent work on the West Midlands was shown at the New Art Gallery Walsall (February – July 2023) and a public art work, commissioned by Meadow Arts and Hereford College of Arts, opened in Hereford June 2023.
This multi-channel video installation from internationally-acclaimed photographer Emily Andersen, explores the work and life of Ruth Fainlight (b.1931) – an American-born poet and writer.
Ruth’s intensely visual poetry and fiction touch on themes of psychological and domestic situations, time, memory and loss. Born in New York City in 1931, she moved to England when she was 15. In 1959 she married the writer, Alan Sillitoe, and her many literary friendships included Sylvia Plath, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Robert Graves.
Andersen’s work is an intimate portrait of Fainlight, now aged 91, presenting fragments of the poet’s life. Taking inspiration from Renaissance triptychs and their depiction of different elements of the same subject across three panels, Somewhere Else Entirely captures the poet and writer at her home in London, making notes, on her walks, and in the seaside town of Brighton where she spent her teenage years.
In Somewhere Else Entirely Fainlight talks off-screen, revealing fascinating insights into her life, her creative process, and how she is ‘in the hands of the poem’. In her voiceover, she movingly recites her poem ‘Somewhere Else Entirely’ composed after the death of her husband.
Alongside the exhibition commissioned an essay by Daniella Schreir, editor of the Feminist Film Journal Another Gaze, which can be read here.
Come along to our launch night on Friday 24 March, 6 pm – 8 pm for a first look round the exhibition, alongside Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines. There will also be free food from 6 pm. Book your free tickets
Emily Andersen is a London-based artist and graduate of the Royal College of Art. Her work has been exhibited in galleries including:
A number of her portraits are in the permanent collection of The National Portrait Gallery, London. She has won awards including the John Kobal prize for portraiture. Her third book Another Place was published in 2023. She is a Senior Lecturer in theory and practice of photography at the Nottingham School of Art & Design at Nottingham Trent University.
Director, Producer, Cinematographer – Emily Andersen
Additional Cinematographer- Bella Riza
Interviews – Kiki Martins and Emily Andersen
Editor – Jonathan Schmidt-Ott
Sound editor – Liam Larkin
Re-recording mixer- Rainer Heesch
Colourist – Jason R. Moffat
Production Assistant – Kyra Paloma
Image: Ruth Fainlight by Emily Andersen
Re-sensitised Symposium re-visits, reflects and re-lives the last seven years of the Sensitive Skin festival.
It brings together a diverse group of artists, all of whom have been part of the festival since its inception in 2000, pondering on the question ‘How has Sensitive Skin evolved over the past seven years and how has Live Art and Performance practice developed during that period?’
Offering talks, presentations, lectures and an “artists in conversation’ panel throughout the day, the event will culminate in a celebration closing this year’s festival, including two performances from Rajni Shah and Harminder Singh Judge.
Leibniz
‘Religious myth’ is a central theme which surrounds all of Judge’s work; whether through his complex installations, interactive performances, bodily adornments or shrine-like sculptures. His current work in progress, Live Sermon, will be shown at the festival as a short durational performance and sound piece.
Part of Sensitive Skin… a season of interdisciplinary arts
Mr Quiver is a durational event that combines the intensity of performance with the intimacy of installation. Exploring themes of identity, theatricality, and our relationship to the land we live on, this performance is built and then destroyed over the space of four hours. Audience members enter the space and leave as they wish, and may walk amongst the performers or sit back and enjoy the spectacle around them.
Rajni Shah (director/performer), Lucille Acevedo-Jones (costume/set designer), and Cis O’Boyle (lighting designer) create three performative loops that weave in and out of synchronisation during the four hours. By repeatedly inhabiting and abandoning the figures of Elizabeth I and a traditional Indian bride, Rajni reveals more and more of her true self during the performance and gently invites the audience to question their own identity.
Complete with haunting original vocals (live and recorded) and a stunning series of costumes, this delicate and probing performance offers up questions and images that will stay with an audience long after leave the event.
Future Factory, based within Nottingham Trent University, is delighted to preset A + B =CC(an) by Paul Matosic. The exhibition which takes place in Bonington Atrium, runs from 16 – 28 April.
The exhibition had been commissioned by Future Factory ad produced in response to the building of a new arts venue: Centre for Contemporary Art, Nottingham (CCAN)
Matosic’s exhibition incorporates a collection of discarded and mislaid objects that are assembled into a sculptural piece that could resemble a cityscape, and which is literally a snapshot of the waste produces by a consumerist society obsessed by the new. Taking the cultural residue of consumer society and re-presenting this is the gallery makes the comment on the process of regeneration.
Paul said:
“we live in a society that is dominated by a ‘NEW IS GOOD’ sensibility. Every which way we turn we are confronted with opportunities to by new stuff and in doing so dispose of some old stuff.
Paul Matosic
Actually look forward to the day when we run out of materials to use in my art because that will mean that society has stopped producing the vast amounts od wast that is the hallmark of consumerism.”
Artery is a collaborative project initiated Matt Hawthorn with the artists group Graft. The project aims to performatively map the course of the River Trent from Source to Sea, by inviting artists to use their practice to excavate hidden identities and generate new mythologies which will be recorded onto an interactive map.
The first incarnation of the map which is installed in The Bonington Gallery for Sensitive Skin, features work by five artists from the last three years of the Expo festival for emerging artists, curated by Graft for Future Factory at Nottingham Trent University.
Will Pollard has been making performance, video and installation work for the past 10 years. He recently completed a PhD at the University of Ulster, Belfast. His work is primarily concerned with the fluctuating relationship between the invisible and visible, especially in relation to the vagaries of performance, such as the relationship between the body and the object and the audience and performer. For Sensitive Skin, all these concerns are explored through a video installation.
Situated in the same room, two video projections exist. Like two people facing each other over a table, both are able to see each other, yet ultimately the slippage in their understanding of each other creates an opening.
The fracturing of light against a multitude of small mirrors mediates the light source whilst presenting this fracturing to the space.
The space awakens to the movement of the fractured light, the dimensions of the space are made visible by the light.
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.
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.
