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
Join Bonington Gallery’s Director, Tom Godfrey for a relaxed lunchtime tour of our current exhibitions, Somewhere Else Entirely by Emily Andersen in our Gallery, and Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines.
• The event is free to attend with limited capacity.
• Booking is required.
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55 pm for a prompt start.
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery.
Join Bonington Gallery’s Deputy Curator Joshua Lockwood-Moran for a relaxed lunchtime tour of our current exhibitions, Somewhere Else Entirely by Emily Andersen in our Gallery, and Nottingham Women’s Centre in our Vitrines.
• The event is free to attend with limited capacity.
• Booking is required.
• Please meet in the Bonington Foyer at 12.55 pm for a prompt start.
• The event will last up to an hour, within the gallery.
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.
The relationships and encounters we have with both real and imagined locations will form the basis of a breathtaking exhibition of recent paintings at Nottingham Trent University. Closer than you think: painting, place and mortality, is the inaugural exhibition by Terry Shave, Professor of Fine Art in the University’s School of Art and Design.
A base image layer, inspired by photographs and previous artwork by Professor Shave, is built upon over time by the hand application of multiple layers of coloured resin; the result is a collection of striking images with intense depth and colour. Each image is presented in three sections, each unique, but achieving a sense of equilibrium through the harmonising of colours which thread through the piece.
Sketches and doodles by art and design staff at Nottingham Trent University are to be shown as part of a major exhibition celebrating the practice of drawing.
Drawing Out will feature hundreds of illustrations by both academic and support staff, which will be combined to create a huge ‘drawing wall’ for the event from 21 April to 9 May.
Everybody from the Dean of the School of Art and Design, right through to academics and support staff are being invited to contribute to the exhibition, being staged in the university’s Bonington and 1851 Galleries.
The event will also feature a curated show of work by artists based in the School, which will attempt to look at drawing in its widest sense.This will range from working drawings for set and costume design, to illustrations that use new laser-cutting technology as a drawing tool; and a series of illustrations produced for publication in international newspapers, to photographic responses to archived drawings in the university’s international lace collection.