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.
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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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Featured in Art Monthly’s December-January issue
亂 — Confusion, state of chaos.
In the ancient form of mandarin the title represents the creative processes and working practice that facilitated this exhibition. Dance artist Lucia Tong, Dance4 and Nottingham Trent University MA Framework students collaborated to create an immersive and interactive installation – interpreting the meaning of Luàn through movement, installation, photography and textiles.
“In 1978, prompted by my interest in people’s attitude to photography, from beyond the primitive notion of your soul being stolen when you have your photograph taken, to whatever was the contemporary notion, I mailed an image of myself to the 84 people who at that time shared my surname in the London Phone Directory, hoping that having this in common would serve as an introduction. I asked for a photograph in return, with their name on the back so that I would know who was responding, and a very large percentage complied, but most were also accompanied by incidental information. There were exceptions; a letter saying that there were no photographs in existence of Doris Jewell, an octogenarian living in Barnes, but I was welcome to go and take one.
This outcome led to me producing ‘London Jewells’, a poster size, four-colour lithographic letter containing a montage of all the photographs received and a précis of the written response. I mailed this poster out to my original list, but omitting the names that the Royal Mail had returned to sender as ‘’unknown at this address’’. This secondary mail out solicited a mixed response, photographs and “wish I’d taken your original letter more seriously” from some of those who had not initially responded and “thanks” from those that had.
I then repeated the process but this time with a similar number of Jewells in the USA, utilising the Los Angeles and Miami phone directories. The response was markedly different, not in volume but by the amount of lithographically produced photographs in the form of Christmas and model agency cards etc., and also far more information on lineage with family trees going back to Bishop Jewell of Salisbury in the 16th Century.
I then framed and exhibited all this material at the 1983 Summer Show at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
In 2009 a publisher enquired of me if I had any plans for another book. I was considering returning to the ‘Jewell’ concept but this time making contact via the internet rather than the postal service; with the development of the world wide web and digital photography, our personal attitudes to portraiture had moved on, the days of Doris Jewell living a long life without a single image of her existence seemed a thing of the past. However, instead I initially ran a Google search of ‘Jewell’ for images, this subsequently also led me to video and audio material baring my surname. The items collated in alphabetical order became Jewell, a Film By Dick Jewell April-August 2010 (133mins), rather than a book it imitates the aspect of multitasking on a computer screen.
My iPhone flower portraits alongside the vitrines, seemed fitting, not only as a traditional subject for wallpaper but in our focus on genealogy when considering the juxtaposition of similar sized subject matter.”
Dick Jewell, 2019.
