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.
Somewhere Else Entirely is photographer Emily Andersen’s first completed video portrait and is inspired by her decade-long friendship with poet Ruth Fainlight. To coincide with the exhibition, Emily and Ruth will be joining us for a free in-conversation event, hosted by Duncan Higgins, Professor of Visual Art at NTU.
Discover how the artists’ relationship grew after a chance meeting, hear how Emily’s intimate video work was made and enjoy a special reading by Ruth.
BIOGRAPHIES
Emily Andersen has been a photographer for four decades. Her work includes interiors, architecture, and landscape but she is best known for her award-winning portraiture, capturing well-known faces including Nico, Peter Blake, and Helen Mirren. 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. She is a Senior Lecturer in photography at the Nottingham School of Art & Design at Nottingham Trent University.
Ruth Fainlight (b. New York City , 1931) is an award-winning poet and translator, whose collections have spanned five decades. Fainlight has lived in England since the age of 15, achieving success in fiction, translation and opera libretti as well as poetry. In 1959 she married the writer, Alan Sillitoe, and her many literary friendships included Sylvia Plath, Jane and Paul Bowles, and Robert Graves. She became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2008.
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.
Katja Hock is a practising artist and a senior lecturer in Photography in the School of Art and Design at Nottingham Trent University. Her latest exhibition will present a slide installation, Stillness and Silence that has been developed over the last three years. The work addresses the importance of historical memory to our present perception of our cultural and social context.
As part of this exhibition Katja Hock will be in conversation with Susan Trangmar, Reader in Fine Art, Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. Located in the Bonington Gallery, this event is open the general public and admission is free.
The leading speciality paper merchant GFSmith celebrates 111 years of redefining how we view paper promotion with this fantastic heritage exhibition.
Having grown from a small family business in the late 1890’s, to a thriving company with over 150 members of staff and a global sales network, the business has adequate reason to celebrate the impact design has played on its success.
This exhibition will showcase material which encompasses both European and American promotions, featuring work from contributors such as Saul Bass, Milton Glaser, Paul Rand, Bill McKay and SEA Design.
Bonington Gallery presents this exciting exhibition by the award-winning British photographer Simon Roberts. Motherland, Homeland explores notions of identity, attachment to home and land, and the relationship between people and place, comprising of two different collections of Roberts’ work; Motherland and We English.
Simon Roberts’ work has been published and exhibited widely and his photographs are represented in major public and private collections. In recognition for his work, Roberts has received several accolades, including the Vic Odden Award from the Royal Photographic Society and a grant from the John Kobal Foundation.
Click this link to visit Simon’s Website
Image by Simon Roberts
Wanderlust speaks of the places, real, imagined and metaphorical, that we travel to through our practice as artists, designers, thinkers and educators. It invokes the desire to wander exploring the world as we find it, often straying from the path and discovering a new route.
This exhibition is a snapshot survey of experimental practice across the range of disciplines in the School of Art & Design. The works featured demonstrate the complex process of creation undertaken by practitioner / researchers within the School community including academic, technical and support staff. Wanderlust is curated as a dialogic space, where varied and diverse practices are placed in proximity to each other, opening up possibilities of new discourses, collaborations and projects. A series of events will tease and test out these possibilities starting with the private view on Wednesday 12 January 2011.
Cockroach Diary and Other Stories brings together works spanning 25 years that convey a compelling sense of both the ordinary and the bizarre in British life. This major exhibition is the first survey show by Anna Fox, one of the most significant photographers to emerge for the new wave of British colour documentary of the 1980s.
As well as Cockroach Diary, this exposition features world including Country Girls, Pictures of Linda, The Village, 41 Hewitt Road, My Mothers Cupboards and My Father’sWords, Back to the Village, and Notes from Home.
Twenty Six Years Later from Professor Lei Cox consists of a multiple of new photographs, new video installations and some retrospective video and photography pieces dating from 1985.
Lei’s early work strived to find surreal and unusual in a pre-digital world, starting with raw and untreated shots. Sometimes these were carefully staged, as he cheated with light and shadow. The vast possibilities of blue-screen super impositions, digital effects snd digital sound processing later influenced his work, allowing him to create complete surrealism with Hollywood-like special effects.
His ;later work moved away from this notion, questioning reality against the synthetic. New ideas were contemplated and realised: videos were shot on location in the real world; all single takes, no special effects, and “pure”.
Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs is a solo exhibition by artist Stephen Willats.
A pioneer of international conceptual art, Stephen Willats has spent six decades concentrating on ideas that today are ever-present in contemporary art: communication, social engagement, active spectatorship, and self-organisation.
During the early 1970s, while living in Nottingham and teaching at the Nottingham College of Art and Design (now Nottingham Trent University), Willats began several interactive projects exploring the relationship between artist and audience, and people in private and public space. Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs (1971/2) saw him work with four tennis clubs in the city – all socially, economically and physical separate – with the idea of uniting different social groups within a shared process.
This exhibition features artwork and archive materials from Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs, on loan to Bonington Gallery from Nottingham City Museums & Galleries. Accompanying it is a new film and photographic series created during the artist’s recent visits to the original tennis clubs, and work produced during Willats’ early years in Nottingham that proved influential to his subsequent career.
Join us for a restaging of the Tennis Tournament that happened at the conclusion of the original project, taking place on the launch day of this exhibition. Stephen will work with members of The Park Tennis Club to re-model the game of tennis based on their reasons for joining the club – using this site and experience as a simulation of a transformed society.
Header image credit: Stephen Willats, Tennis Super Girls, 1971/72
For six decades, Stephen Willats (born in London in 1943) has concentrated on ideas that today are ever-present in contemporary art: communication, social engagement, active spectatorship and self-organisation, and has initiated many seminal multi-media art projects. He has situated his pioneering practice at the intersection between art and other disciplines such as cybernetics – the hybrid post-war science of communication – advertising, systems research, learning theory, communications theory and computer technology. In so doing, he has constructed and developed a collaborative, interactive and participatory practice grounded in the variables of social relationships, settings and physical realities. Rather than presenting visitors with icons of certainty he creates a random, complex environment which stimulates visitors to engage in their own creative process.
Willats has exhibited internationally and his work can be found in public collections held by Tate, Arts Council England and The Victoria and Albert Museum.
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