exhibition Archives - Page 18 of 27

Between 16 December 2019 and 10 January 2020, Nick Chaffe worked within the gallery as our ‘Motif Artist in Residence’ alongside Bruce Asbestos. During this time, Nick embraced laser cutting technology to further explore his illustrative style of minimalising and fusing together everyday items to create new meaning and possibility.

Concurrent to Bruce Asbestos’ Spring/Summer 2020 collection launch, Nick will be showcasing outcomes from his residency in the form of jewellery, sculpture and prints, as well as experiments and samples from the various processes he has been exploring.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Mike Kane.

Biography

Nick is a graphic artist, illustrator and brand designer based in Manchester. He has worked with Amnesty International, The Oscars, Time Out, London Jazz Festival, Manchester International Festival, and more locally Nottingham Contemporary and 200 Degrees Coffee.

In late November, we opened our doors to introduce the next exciting preview in our 2019/20 season of exhibitions – Motif. An experience bringing together 15 years of research conducted by our very own Tim Rundle, Principal Lecturer in BA (Hons) Fashion Communication and Promotion here at NTU.

After 30 years of aggressive shifts in design, our relationship to retail, consumption, personal and lifestyle narratives are unrecognisable. One of the key markers of these global changes is our adoption of motifs. The exhibition celebrates both badges of belonging and icons of individuality throughout society, charting shifts in consumer behaviour and popular culture over the decades.

Thanks to everyone who joined us on the preview evening, it was a fantastic atmosphere and a great way to celebrate incredible talent of our staff and researchers here at Nottingham Trent University.

Join us in exploring a 15-year history of the application and appropriation of motif across a wide range of design cultures, and play a part in reinterpreting the future relationship between image and message.

Bonington Gallery is delighted to present Motif, an exhibition and experience that brings together 15 years of research conducted by Nottingham Trent University’s Tim Rundle, Principal Lecturer in BA (Hons) Fashion Communication and Promotion.

Motifs have become the cultural hieroglyphics of our times, charting a new labyrinthine set of semiotics that reflect shifts in social identity and consumer behaviour. As the new cryptologic visual shorthand, motifs have become a dominant form of communication, from tote to tattoo, replacing text with emoji, logo with image, city name with icon. Adopted as both badges of belonging and icons of individuality, motifs can be understood as markers of creative conformity or aesthetic innovation.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Motif Artist in Residence

Between Monday 16 December and Friday 10 January we are delighted to welcome Nick Chaffe & Bruce Asbestos as our Motif Artists in Residence. Working within the gallery, both practitioners will create work in response to the premise of the exhibition that will then be manifested through a public display. Bruce Asbestos will work towards a presentation of his S/S 2020 Fashion Collection, and Nick will work towards a currently undetermined outcome. Follow our digital channels for updates.

Biographies

Bruce Asbestos lives and works in Nottingham, UK. His broad work encompasses performance, painting, clothing, social media, computer games, and a multitude of collaborations. Recent projects and exhibitions include: Bruce Asbestos x Juliana Sissons 2019 Collection, A/W 2018 Collection Nottingham Contemporary and Kunstraum, London, an Arts Council International Fund project to NYC and Philadelphia, Bruce Asbestos A-B Testing, Concrete, Hayward Gallery, London. MTN DEW, Commission by EM15 for ‘Sunscreen’, Venice Biennale. Ivan Poe, Plymouth Art Weekender (Main commission as ‘Reactor’).

Nick Chaffe is a graphic artist, illustrator and brand designer based in Manchester. He has worked with Amnesty International, The Oscars, Time Out, London Jazz Festival, Manchester International Festival and more locally Nottingham Contemporary and 200 Degrees Coffee.

Motif Map Workshop

A decade and a half of research into the use of motifs in design and culture has resulted in the creation of two new workshops that will run in January 2020 here at NTU. The sessions, designed for both teachers and designers, will offer a series of new tools to change your approaches to the use of brand, design, motif, and image.

From Our Blog

Join A Common Craft for a Day of Ritual to end the Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites exhibition at Bonington Gallery. Through a series of workshops and aural experiences, we will share techniques in grounding, healing, and everyday magical practices. No experience or prior knowledge is necessary. The day will be split into two sessions, each involving two rituals, as outlined below.

Please note that booking is essential for each session, as we have limited places available.

Day of Ritual: Part One

I – Join celebrant Keli Tomlin to explore the creation of sacred space and the practice of grounding, both for ritual and in daily life. We will work alone and as a group to examine different methods of grounding in the moment and in your environment, as well as considering the protective and inspirational qualities of a space made sacred.

II – Elemental incantations: An immersive sound healing ritual with Freya Barlow, Blue Firth, and Isabel Jones, using the voice as a tool for communal healing, relaxation, and comfort. Please bring something cushioning, like a blanket or mat for your comfort on the floor.

Day of Ritual: Part Two

III – A live ritual performed by Hawthonn. A transcendental aural experience calling in potential alternatives for our political climate through magic, sacred feminine archetypes, and relationships with the landscape.

A Common Craft is a series of podcasts about the archetype of the witch, witchcraft and magic and how these subjects may affect our daily lives – sometimes without us even noticing. Through interviews and storytelling, each episode will present a journey through occult ideas, feminism, healthcare, gender, and popular culture. A Common Craft was made by Blue Firth commissioned on behalf of Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, a touring exhibition which looks to the importance of craft, ritual and land on the practice of the ever-shifting figure of the witch.

Hawthonn performing. Courtesy of the artist.

A closing ritual with Fourthland. Courtesy of the artist.

The Other Film Club presents The Other Side Of The Underneath (1972), the only British feature film to have been directed by a feminist during the 1970s. Directed by Jane Arden, this powerful film explores the mind of a young woman diagnosed as a schizophrenic. Alleged madness is found to be an act of social oppression.

One of the most outspoken and radical feminist voices in British Theatre and cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, Arden has since been virtually silenced by her near-invisibility: her books long out of print, her plays unperformed, and her films unscreened until recently.

This event is the second in a series of screenings and discussions organised by The Other Film Club that forms research into the radical feminist and experimental filmmaker Jane Arden (1927-1982). The series is hosted by Paul Bryan, an MFA Fine Art student at Nottingham Trent University (NTU), with the support of Nottingham Contemporary, and in collaboration with Bonington Gallery. Paul will be joined in conversation with Susan Croft from Unfinished Histories. This event is a collaboration with the public programme for Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites, hosted by Bonington Gallery from Friday 27 September to Saturday 16 November 2019.

An introductory performance by NTU’s recently graduated Fine Art students exploring Arden’s poetry and prose will be followed by an in-conversation between Susan Croft and Paul Bryan for exploring Arden’s artistic practice after the screening.

Content Guidance

Please note this film has an 18 certificate and contains explicit sexual images and nudity.

Other Film Club

The Other Film Club is a screening programme organised by Paul Bryan that has previously screened films regarding the practices of Sarah Lucas, About Sarah (2014) directed by Elisa Miller, I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (2015), directed by Marianne Lambert, and Penny Slinger Out Of The Shadows (2018), directed by Richard Kovitch.

Biographies

Jane Arden (1927-1982) was a Welsh film director, actress, screenwriter, playwright, songwriter and poet. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw Arden cementing her reputation as one of Britain’s leading feminist voices with such films as Separation (1967) and Anti-Clock (1979), the multimedia play Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven and A New Communion for Freaks, Prophets and Witches’ born out of the Theatre group set up by Arden called Holocaust. In 2009, her three films Separation, Anti-Clock, and The Other Side of the Underneath were restored and re-released by the BFI.

Susan Croft is a writer, curator, dramaturg, performance archive consultant and historian with special interests in women playwrights, black and Asian theatre in Britain, live art and new writing for performance. Unfinished Histories was established in 2006 by Croft and Jessica Higgs with the aim of recording the history of British alternative theatre between 1968 – 1988.

In Works from the Hallucinated Archive, Wayne Burrows brings together material by six artists (five real, one fictional) who work across a range of media and traditions but all share an interest in ideas around folklore, spiritual belief and art as psychic manifestation or transmission.

The vitrines and foyer are occupied by works from the fabricated archive of an entirely fictional British artist, Robert Holcombe (1923 – 2003). Gathered into an exhibition that might be read as a scholarly contribution to a previously unknown (and wilfully esoteric) chapter in the story of Post-War British Art. Or perhaps a fiction exploring ideas of authenticity, class and cultural identity by ‘restoring’ to our attention a figure who might plausibly have existed, but failed or refused to fit the standard narratives and frameworks of his time.

This archival fiction is further layered and complicated by its deployment as a framing device for a group of works by five other artists, mostly contemporary, sometimes hallucinatory in effect, and all real. Their shared fascinations with altered states, fringe beliefs, folklore and ritual, play against their own (and our) ingrained sceptical instincts with humour and a strong awareness of absurdity. After all, whatever the precise nature of any particular psychic or paranormal phenomenon might be, such subjective experiences plainly share conceptual ground with the transformative, healing and wish-fulfilling objectives of art itself. Just as a fiction is a very literal kind of alternate reality, a song, a form of spell-casting or invocation, and any film or photograph in existence is a very literal kind of ghost.

The artworks and fictional ephemera featured work together as something that exists between a curated group show and a single installation to generate a kind of ‘Alice in Wonderland’ rabbit-hole: a collage portal into a parallel world that may already exist within the familiar yet often nightmarish one we currently inhabit.

Maryam Hashemi, Spell Tapestry, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Featured Artists

Launching our 2019/20 season, we’re delighted to present Waking the Witch: Old Ways, New Rites – an exhibition looking at the importance of craft, ritual and land to the practice of the ever-shifting figure of the witch.

The British Isles have a particularly strong relationship to magic and the occult, with the chants of witchcraft echoing throughout their history. Traditional witchcraft has a strong connection to the earth, and an intimate knowledge of herbs, plants and the elements, as well as the human body. As gatekeepers to altered consciousness, witches have been both feared and sought out for their dealings with the unknown. Historically persecuted as an outsider, the witch has been taken on by artists as a challenging force to prevailing norms, and as a symbol of dissidence.

Looking to symbols, tools and the coven as a space for focusing collective intent, the artists in this exhibition explore the path of the witch as a way for us to connect with the earth and each other.

Ben Jeans Houghton will open the exhibition with an improvised performance, expressing aspects of his own magical practice through a harmonic voice and the spoken word, using repurposed effects pedals, loopers, ritual tools, and costume.

Installation view. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Julian Lister.

Ayesha Tan Jones, Whychcraft?, 2017. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Fiona Finnegan and Candice Lin, installation view. Courtesy of the artists. Photo: Julian Lister.

Selection of magazines. Courtesy of Rupert White and Legion Projects. Photo: Julian Lister.

Nadine Byrne, Dream Family (costumes), 2011. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Katarzyna Majak, installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Verity Birt, Repeated again, exhoes linger, 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Nadine Byrne, Book of Dream Family 3, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Fiona Finnegan, installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Lucy Stein, Polly, 2012. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Serena Korda, The Jug Choir, 2015 (detail). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Cathy Ward, Home Rites, 2009. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Cathy Ward, installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Museum of Witchcraft objects, installation view. Courtesy of Simon Costin. Photo: Julian Lister.

Anna Bunting-Branch, installation view. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Nadine Byrne, Dream Family, 2011. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Ben Jeans Houghton, Else Skyclad Lad, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Fourthland, Imbue, 2018. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Julian Lister.

Exhibition Opening with Ben Jeans Houghton

Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Luke Brennan.

Featured Artists

Bonington Gallery has been a significant part of the cultural landscape of Nottingham for half a century. Its diverse and ambitious artistic programme has consistently presented the forefront of creative practice and through this has gained an national reputation.

The gallery is situated within the Bonington building, first opened on 14 October 1969 by Her Royal Highness the Duchess of Kent. This labyrinth of a modernist building is nestled in the heart of our City Campus and is home to a wide range of creative courses, providing a suitable context for an artistic programme that profiles a wide range of creative practice.

Over the past five decades, we’ve showcased visual and performing arts from across the world, reflected in the ongoing work to establish our archive. We’re committed to making the next 50 years as memorable as the first, starting now.

Yesterday we welcomed a fantastic panel of experts to lead a discussion on fashion, art, archives, and everything in between; from the ethics and sustainability of fashion, through to the importance and challenges of maintaining archives and thoughts on interdisciplinary working.

Chaired by Tom Godfrey (Bonington Gallery Curator and curator of CJ), the panel included Naomi Braithwaite (Senior Lecturer in the School of Art and Design at NTU and custodian of the FashionMap Archive), Ruby Hoette (Designer and researcher and Programme Leader of MA Design: Expanded Practice at Goldsmiths University) and Caroline Stevenson (Curator, writer and lecturer and Head of Cultural and Historical Studies at London College of Fashion)

Image from C/J: In Conversation, featuring Naomi Braithwaite, Ruby Hoette, and Caroline Stevenson. Chaired by Tom Godfrey

C/J is open until Saturday 18 May. If you haven’t already, be sure to drop by!

Bonington Gallery is delighted to present C/J, an exhibition of newly commissioned work by Los Angeles-based artist, musician and jewellery designer Chloé Maratta and Glasgow-based artist and musician Joanne Robertson.

Reflecting their shared interests in clothing, both artists have been invited to work with artefacts from Nottingham Trent University’s (NTU) FashionMap Archive, a unique collection of garments and accessories purchased from high street retailers since 2000.

Maratta embeds her practice into her life via a process of gathering clothing and ephemera that she encounters and experiences on a daily basis. Materials are collaged into styled outfits and extended into photography, photo-collage and sculpture.

Robertson works predominantly with painting that frequently extends beyond the canvas to found objects. Presenting racks of clothing alongside her paintings, Robertson objectifies garments in order to emulate the conditions of abstract painting – form, colour, surface and materiality. She’s currently touring her music in New Zealand, and answered a few questions from Undertheradar.co.nz, in which she refers to the upcoming exhibition at Bonington Gallery, as well as discussing the process of collaborating with other artists, and the strong link between her music and visual practices.

Through art production, music and fashion, both artists convey an immediacy and irreverence towards various forms of cultural and social hierarchy, making the involvement of NTU’s high-street fashion archive all the more poignant.

Artwork Details

Chloe Maratta

Joanne Robertson