Views of Matlock Bath channelled visual traditions and tropes from both photography and painting.
George Miles’ sublime large-format photographs explore how the land is used, viewed, and mediated: both physically and through its representations. This much loved local valley, championed for its picturesque qualities by the tastemakers of their times including Byron and Ruskin, bore witness to the consolidation of the English Landscape tradition, the birth of the Industrial Revolution, and of mass tourism.
In this show these interconnections and the relationship they bear upon how we view the landscape were explored through a re-presentation of a selection of images from the book that this exhibition accompanied.
A solo exhibition by Debra Swann consolidating her artistic research through sculpture, video and photography.
The show was an exploration of historical domestic spaces and the personas that may evolve through these spaces. Thinking about the repetition of tasks and the familiar sites of the home, narratives are created to comment on relentless labour and the strangeness of the comings and goings of the home.
A number of historic locations become backdrops, stages or sites for making work. The re-contextualization of objects made for such places took the viewer through subtle juxtapositions of time and reality. Blurring the relationship between fact and fiction the viewer could question what they are looking at and the process by which history is written and how we establish truth.
Summer Lodge celebrated its 5 Year Anniversary in 2014. For ten days each July, the Fine Art studios and workshops of Nottingham Trent University are transformed and play host to a gathering of thirty diverse artists.
As part of this celebration the Gallery was used as a testing space, giving the public a glimpse into the activities of the Lodgers through live stream to screens in the foyer before being used as an exhibition space.
The Lodge was a collective space in which to undertake experiments, pursue new ideas and allow unexpected leaps of imagination. Participants in the Summer Lodge came together with the aim of initiating new dialogues and critical exchange through engaging in a period of sustained studio / workshop practice.
This years participants included artists from Nottingham Trent University; Sheffield Hallam University; Bergen Academy of Art and Design; Harrington Mills Studios; One Thoresby Street; and Backlit Studios.
At the completion of the Lodge, the Gallery was opened to the public to showcase the diverse range of work created across the ten days.
Summer Lodge: 30 June – 11 July 2014 (public could watch activities unfolding via live stream in the foyer)
Exhibition: 14 – 22 July 2014
For more information, and for ongoing documentation during the Lodge, visit: www.summerlodge.org.
As part of Nottingham Trent University’s 170th Anniversary of Art and Design, this exhibition showcased a collection of images by acclaimed architectural photographer, Martine Hamilton Knight D.Litt (hon).
The exhibition looked back over the last 20 years in recognition of the innovative and iconic buildings that make up Nottingham’s skyline.
Featuring the work of Hopkins Architects, this exhibition included the stunning Inland Revenue building, Nottingham Trent University’s Newton and Arkwright building and the University of Nottingham’s Jubilee Campus, as well as other Nottingham Trent University buildings.
Venue
Newton Building
Goldsmith Street
Nottingham
NG1 4BU
In this exhibition artist Sean Cummins explored a found image, depicting a control room of an experimental nuclear reactor from 1963. Cummins used this image as a catalyst for an exhibition of paintings.
The exhibition title refers to both Van Gogh’s early masterpiece The Potato Eaters and the notion of cold fusion, a hypothetical type of nuclear reaction that occurs at room temperature.
This series of paintings makes an unusual connection between early modernist painting and the utopian aspirations of the creators of nuclear technology. There is a humorous juxtaposition between the agrarians depicted in The Potato Eaters and scientists operating the nuclear power station. A depiction of subsistence and the fiction of cold fusion and its limitless supply of energy.
Cummins knowingly played on paintings’ history and processes, as his images aspired to a collapse of space and time.
From dying fabrics for costumes and hangings for nine touring companies of the musical Hair in 1970, to producing an atelier collection of hand-dyed garments and accessories under her own label from 1981-2005, Marian Clayden’s unique and luxurious designs are virtuoso Bohemian chic.
This vibrant and diverse exhibition showcased examples of Clayden’s work with influences from Grand Opera, Iran, Kabuki and ethnic dance. Clayden’s trail-blazing textiles and garments blurred the boundaries between art, textiles and fashion.
Born and raised in Preston, Marian Clayden studied painting at Nottingham School of Art and prepared for a career as a primary school teacher. Her passion for painting developed into an interest in textiles-as-art while living in Australia with her young family. Their move to California in 1967 led to collaborations with stage/television designer Bob Mackie in Los Angeles and the New York fashion designers, Georgio di Sant’Angelo and Mary McFadden.
Under her own label, Clayden Inc, she forged a high-profile list of clients for her evening wear, including Lisa Marie Presley, Meryl Streep, Sigourney Weaver and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Beyond the Line was an international, interdisciplinary collaboration involving artist-writer Emma Cocker, artist Nikolaus Gansterer (Vienna) and choreographer Mariella Greil (Vienna).
Cocker, Gansterer and Greil inhabited the gallery as an experimental ‘method laboratory’ for staging an encounter between choreography, drawing and writing; between body, mark and text.
Through processes of reciprocal exchange, dialogue and negotiation between three different practices, Beyond the Line interrogated the interstitial processes, practices and knowledge(s) produced in the ‘deviation’ for example, from page to performance, from word to mark, from line to action, from modes of flat image making towards transformational embodied encounters.
Glimpses of the unfolding ‘method laboratory’ were made possible through a live-feed video stream that could be viewed in the Bonington foyer. The ‘laboratory’ was open to the public at scheduled times where the artists were ‘in-residence’ to share their working processes.
Beyond the Line was conceived as ‘test-bed’ for exploring collaborative methods for working between and beyond the disciplinary lines of drawing, dance and writing and is supported by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, the Arts and Culture (BMUKK). Ideas and working processes emerging from Beyond the Line will be developed further as part of a 3-year collaborative research project between Cocker, Gansterer and Greil entitled Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line 2014 – 2017 (funded by the Austrian Program for Arts-based Research, PEEK).
Thursday 17 April from 10.00 am – 4.00 pm.
Schedule
10 am – 12 pm: Live Exploration Session
12 pm – 1.30 pm: The lab remains open with fragments of the research process made visible
1.30 pm – 3 pm: Live Exploration Session
3 pm – 4 pm: Discussion
This exhibition brought together a unique group of artists and designers who are members of a research group based at Cardiff School of Art & Design.
Led by Robert Pepperell, the participants were each interested in the way art and design can contribute to questions about human nature and experience, of the kind often asked by scientists and philosophers. How, for example, are we able to have visual knowledge of the world, and what does it look like? What is a body, and how does having one change the way we make and experience art? Are aesthetics properties features of an object, a person, a brain, a mobile body, a social context – or some combination of these?
Professor Robert Pepperell, Alise Piebalga, Robin Hawes, James Green, Craig Thomas, Theo Humphries, Chris de Selincourt
An exhibition of over 100 selected works from Nottingham Trent University alumni, held across the University’s City site. The work detailed the impact that our alumni have had internationally on the visual arts and creative industries.
Just a few of the alumni who were involved with the exhibition:
Urban artist Jon Burgerman, Turner prize winner Simon Starling, Artist duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster, Photographer Andy Earl, Film director Jonathan Glazer, Knitwear designer Motohiro Tanji, Actor and comedian Paul Kaye, Sculptor Wolfgang Buttress, Landscape designer Sarah Price, Paper cut artist Rob Ryan, Visual artist Lucy Orta, Furniture designer Alexander Taylor
Plus many more; some of the exhibits on show were newly commissioned work special for the NTU Alumni Show.
For more details about In The Making and all events and activities surrounding Since 1843, please visit the Since 1843 webpage.
Click here to download the exhibition audio guide.
A catalogue featuring the profiles of all the exhibitors is available to buy online, or directly from the Bonington Art shop.
Drawing is said to have the ability to record both its own making and the movement of the thoughts and body of the drawer.
Bringing together the work of several artists with differing practices Drawology aimed to consider whether this premise is applicable to a specific process or genre of drawing or whether it is applicable to drawing generally.
The works in the exhibition represented an expanded field of contemporary drawing in a Fine Art context to include: works on paper, performance, moving image, installation, projections and three-dimensional drawings. The exhibition was part of a larger research project being undertaken by Deborah Harty entitled ‘Drawing is phenomenology’.
Shaun Belcher, Sian Bowen, Rachael Colley, David Connearn, Paul Fieldsend-Danks, Maryclare Foa, Paul Gough, Joe Graham, Deborah Harty, Claude Heath, humhyphenhum, Juliet MacDonald, Jordan McKenzie, Lucy O’Donnell, Bill Prosser, Karen Wallis, Martin Lewis, Patricia Cain, Simón Granell, humhyphenhumha, David Connearn, Andrew Pepper
During the exhibition, the gallery hosted several “in residence” sessions, based on Traci Kelly’s model for interactive research for From Where I Stand I Can See You.
Wednesday 27 November 10.30 am – 1.30 pm:
Professor Marsha Meskimmon, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History and Theory at Loughborough University
Wednesday 27 November 1 pm – 5 pm:
Danica Maier, Senior Lecturer Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University
Thursday 5 December 11 am – 2 pm & 3 pm – 5 pm:
Dr Kevin Love, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Social Theory at Nottingham Trent University
Alongside Drawology the Gallery also hosted a student-led exhibition challenging the notion of drawing in contemporary art.