Delivered by James Langdon and Peter Nencini
This workshop will introduce you to the mysterious science of pataphysics, as a resource for designers.
Pataphysics is the invention of a nineteenth-century French author, Alfred Jarry, defined by him as the “science of imaginary solutions.”
Pataphysics continues today as an International College dedicated to Jarry’s idea that every event in the world is a unique happening, not subject to any general or repeatable laws.
Drawing on the College’s ideology and publications, this workshop will explore exceptions and discontinuities in simple design exercises.
Materials: please bring your preferred writing and drawing tools and materials.
Suitable for people aged 18+
Click here to see more from James Langdon
Click here to see more from Peter Nencini
This workshop is in association with the exhibition Mould Map 6 – Terraformers.
In January 2016 the Gallery was traced back to an open white space: a surface on which to draw and experience drawing.
Over the course of one month artists were invited to spend a period of time in the Gallery creating lines, marks and tones that explore and responding to the space through a variety of drawing processes. The exhibition celebrated the expanded field of contemporary drawing, including: paper, performance, moving image, installation, projections and three-dimensional drawing.
Artists included: humhyphenhum, Lorraine Young, Catherine Bertola, Joe Graham, Andrew Pepper, Martin Lewis, and John Court.
The month started with humhyphenhum (Deborah Harty & Phil Sawdon), who were the first to enter the white space; drawing with paper and moving image to create a three-dimensional drawing that traces in, on and through the surface of the empty white space.
Lorraine Young and Catherine Bertola followed, spending two days and three days respectively on the developing drawing. The third week saw contributions from Joe Graham, Andrew Pepper and Martin Lewis.
John Court was the final invited artist to enter the space, spending three days drawing in the Gallery.
Finally, humhyphenhum returned to the space to complete the drawing and prepare for a closing night celebration on Thursday 11 February, where visitors could view the final collaborative drawing.
Performing Drawology was curated by humhyphenhum and forms part of the ongoing research project by Deborah Harty entitled Drawing is Phenomenology.
In addition to the residency, informal discussions with the artists, student workshops and outreach events also took place.
Developments in the space were recorded throughout the process on our blog.
Vantage were made available in the Gallery throughout the exhibition to encourage visitors to witness and engage with the work as it continuously unfolded and took form.
The artists welcomed responses from the public and designated specific discussion events when visitors were invited to meet the artists and to pose any questions they had about the work taking place. Below is a record of when these sessions took place:
humhyphenhum, Friday 15 – Friday 22 January (inclusive)
Progress discussion: Wednesday 20 January, 2 pm – 3 pm
Summary discussion: Friday 22 January 3 pm – 4 pm
Lorraine Young, Monday 25 – Tuesday 26 January (inclusive)
Summary discussion: Tuesday 26 January, 3 pm – 4 pm
Joe Graham, Tuesday 2 – Wednesday 3 February (inclusive)
Summary discussion: Wednesday 3 February, 3 pm – 4 pm
Andrew Pepper, Thursday 4 February
Martin Lewis, Friday 5 February
John Court, Monday 8 – Wednesday 10 February (inclusive)
Progress discussion: Tuesday 9 February, 2 pm – 3 pm
Summary discussion: Wednesday 10 February, 4 pm – 5 pm
humhyphenhum, Thursday 11 February
Thursday 11th February, 5pm – 8 pm
The exhibition culminated in a closing event on Thursday 11 February from 5 pm – 8 pm, whereby the public were invited to come and see the outcomes of the show as a final staged exhibition.
Bonington Gallery Atrium
Alongside the closing event we also hosted an exhibition by 400 students from Architecture and Interior Architecture at Nottingham Trent University and West Bridgford Infant School, who participated in a series of collaborative drawing workshops during the course of Performing Drawology.
To coincide with the In Place of Architecture exhibition in the Gallery from 6 November – 11 December, this symposium brings together photographers, filmmakers, and writers on photography and architecture to examine the role that photography and moving image play in our contemporary interpretation, perception and understanding of the architectural environment.
Keynote speaker: Andrew Higgott, author and co editor of Camera Constructs.
Speakers will include:
#NTUIPOA
Click here to download the symposium handout
Bonington Gallery is very pleased to present QAI/GB-NGM by Warsaw (Poland) based artist Karol Radziszewski. This exhibition will present archival materials from Radziszewski’s Queer Archives Institute (QAI) that focusses on Central and Eastern European queer history and culture.
Consistent with previous QAI presentations, this exhibition will connect to its locality by featuring materials related to Nottingham’s own queer history and culture. This site specificity is reflected in the title of the exhibition that utilises Nottingham’s International Organization for Standardization (ISO) location code ‘GB–NGM’.
Alongside archival materials from the QAI, the exhibition will feature artworks and ongoing bodies of work by Radziszewski.
Established by Radziszewski in November 2015, the QAI is a non-profit artist-run organization dedicated to the research, collection, digitalisation, presentation, exhibition, analysis and artistic interpretation of queer archives, with a special focus on the countries of the former Eastern Bloc. The QAI is a long-term project open to transnational collaboration with artists, activists and academic researchers. The Institute carries out a variety of activities and projects – from exhibitions, publications, lectures and installations to performances.
Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980) lives and works in Warsaw (Poland), where he received his MFA from the Academy of Fine Arts in 2004. He works with film, photography, installations and creates interdisciplinary projects. His archive-based methodology crosses multiple cultural, historical, religious, social and gender references. Since 2005 he has been the publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine. He is the founder of the Queer Archives Institute (2015). His work has been presented in institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; New Museum, New York; VideoBrasil, São Paulo; TOP Museum, Tokyo; Kunsthaus Graz, Austria; Cobra Museum, Amsterdam; Wroclaw Contemporary Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in Krakow and Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz. He has participated in several international biennales including PERFORMA 13, New York; 7th Göteborg Biennial; 4th Prague Biennial; 15th WRO Media Art Biennale and recently The Baltic Triennial 14.
In 2021, The Power of Secrets dedicated to Radziszewski’s archival practice was published by Sternberg Press.
Header image credit: Karol Radziszewski, Afterimages, film still, 2018.
The exhibition has been curated by Tom Godfrey, Director of Bonington Gallery.
Supported by Joshua Lockwood-Moran, Tamsin Greaves (NTU Placement) and Rachael Mackerness (NTU Placement).
Technicians: Harry Freestone, James E Smith, Claire Davies, Emily Stollery.
Thanks to The Sparrows Nest for the generous support, advice and loan of the publications.
This exhibition celebrated the collaboration between two typographic forces: Alan Kitching, a leading practitioner in letterpress, typography and design; and Monotype, global trailblazers in type and home to some of the world’s most popular typefaces.
The exhibition featured the Alan Kitching Collection which celebrated the lives of five very influential graphic designers: Tom Eckersley, Abram Games, FHK Henrion, Josef Müller-Brockmann, and Paul Rand.
The show revealed the process behind the making of the Collection; following Alan’s journey from research and sketches, through the Monotype archive, to Alan’s workshop and the finished printed pieces.
#NTUAlanKitching #Monotype
During the exhibition, students at Nottingham Trent University and visitors of the exhibition were invited to design their very own personalised monogram to be in with a chance of winning a limited edition print from the Alan Kitching Collection. The rules were simple; the monogram had to:
1) include your own initials
2) use one letter from the typefaces used in the Alan Kitching Collection. The subsequent letters could come from anywhere: another typeface, hand-drawn, a found letter…
3) be rendered in a way that it tells us something about the designer.
Entries were then uploaded with the hashtag #NTUmonogram to Twitter, Instagram or Facebook.
The competition ended on Sunday 18 October 2015, and the winner (selected by Alan Kitching himself) was announced on Thursday 22 October.
Read all about the winning entry and the runners-up in this story on our blog.
To find out more, read the full competition details.
Johan Sandborg, Pro Rector, Bergen Academy of Art and Design Norway; newly appointed Visiting Professor at Nottingham Trent University.
Duncan Higgins, Professor of Visual Art, Nottingham Trent University; Academic Chair, Bonington Gallery; Professor in Fine Art, Bergen Academy of Art and Design Norway.
To coincide with the opening of the Returns exhibition, we’re delighted to host the UK premier book launch of three new publications – In a Place Like This. Their focus, an on-going artistic research project, exploring both personal and historical traditions concerned with a relationship to the representation of violence.
In a Place Like This explores the echoes of places, people and the impact of terrible histories. The central question to the research is the difficulty we face when we try to communicate our most intimate experiences to others.
Sandborg and Higgins have focused on the language of imagery, what it may represent and how to make ideas and emotions visible. This exploration is neither an explanation nor a mystification; rather it attempts to propose visual discussions.
In a Place Like This is assembled as a montage, an interwoven idea, in an attempt to review a narrative within the spaces in which it is inscribed.
Read more about In a Place Like This
A joint exhibition by photographer Chris Barrett and researcher Gianluca Spezza
Under Kim Jong Un’s leadership, North Korea has made a conscious decision to be more proactive in the media world. In 2013 we saw the very first live tweeted image of the North Korean leader, from mainstream Western media.
Icons of Rhetoric (IoR) offered a different approach to documenting North Korea, merging established news media practices with more contemporary ones, drawing particular attention to social media.
“While researching an article about an Instagram account claiming to be the official outlet of North Korean news, I started to think about the visual representation of North Korea.
Chris Barrett, photographer and curator
The idea of the project became a reflection on our engagement with modern media techniques, our consumption of images and our knowledge of this ‘most closed off country in the world’ that is the DPRK, all this interwoven with the notion of democratized propaganda.”
By reinterpreting images that already exist in the public domain, Icons of Rhetoric played on an aesthetic of authenticity.
Read more about the Icons of Rhetoric research project.
Follow #IconsofRhetoric on social media:
@IconsofRhetoric
@KazakhPilot (Gianluca Spezza)
facebook.com/IconsOfRhetoric
instagram.com/iconsofrhetoric
Taking place in Nottingham Trent University’s Old Chemistry Theatre, the space is reduced to a minimal setting of a table and chair, a notebook laptop and the human body. The performance aims to create an intimacy with the viewer whilst allowing the interplay between what is real and the virtual world.
Notebook Series is collaboration between a choreographer, Colette Sadler and set-designer, Philine Rinnert. The reference to a notebook in the title reflects shared ongoing process and research. The notebook is both a holding structure and platform for the collaborative process in so far as it allows the laying out and organisation of images, texts and choreographic notes or studies differently from those suggested by real time and space.
In a situation reminiscent of a lecture or public speech, the performance questions the identity of the performer. Moving between the real and the fictional in a clinical deconstruction and disassociation of the human body and its senses, the performance asks “What are you” and “Who are you” in an investigation of the human capacity for transformation and the possibility of living beyond the self.
For full details please visit the Dance4 What’s On pages
Notebook Series is part of the Nottdance Festival 2015. The festival runs from the 5 – 15 March with over 40 performances taking place over 11 days, across more than 20 venues and public spaces.
Download the full NottDance Festival programme here.
Returns formed part of an on-going collaboration between Nottingham Trent University and Sheffield Hallam University (SHU). Established in 2012, it developed out of an International Research Project titled Topographies of the Obsolete, set up by Bergen Academy of Art and Design, Norway; and focused on the disused ceramics factory in Stoke-on-Trent, Spode Works.
The aim of the research was to deepen and develop our understanding of the post-industrial landscape with specific reference to the industrial ruin. Through a series of residencies and workshops, a cross-disciplinary group of artists and researchers from a range of international art institutions set out to explore the socio-economic histories, industrial architecture and production remains of the former Spode Works. The results of the research were exhibited and published during the British Ceramics Biennial in September 2013 and Seconds, in the Lace Market Gallery in March 2014.
The exhibition at Bonington Gallery was the first showing of the newly generated outcomes, with a subsequent exhibition taking place at Sheffield Hallam SIA Gallery in Winter 2016. Each exhibition showed a new development from the work previously exhibited, demonstrating the progression of the research.
The exhibition brought together artistic research from NTU:
Andrew Brown, Joanne Lee, Danica Maier, Debra Swann, and Chloë Brown from SHU.
Recent fine art graduates who participated in the original Spode project were in residence during the exhibition, from NTU:
Ciaran Harrington, and Christine Stevens.
Throughout the Returns exhibition, researchers from the project led a series of discussion workshops. Each session was intended for a small group of invited speakers and participants who considered a specific area emerging from the concerns uncovered in Returns’ research through practice.
The discussions took the form of presentations, group conversations and practical activities. Their aim was to bring together professionals and practitioners to reflect upon three particular points of focus:
Digging through Dirt: Archaeology past, present, precious and unwanted
Wednesday 11 February, 1 pm – 2.15 pm
Artists will have your Ruin: Regeneration through the arts
Wednesday 18 February, 1 pm – 2.15 pm
Ruins of Craft: Lost art of making
Wednesday 25 February, 1 pm – 2.15 pm
The Crafting Anatomies project places the human body at the centre of a multi-disciplinary dialogue; exploring how this entity has been interpreted, crafted and re-imagined in historical, contemporary and future contexts.
This one-day symposium will explore the curious practices of a selection of Crafting Anatomies’ exhibitors, highlighting a preoccupation with the human condition in a breadth of exploratory contexts.
Delegates will also have the opportunity to visit the Crafting Anatomies exhibition in conjunction with this event and see ocularist and Crafting Anatomies exhibitor, John Pacey-Lowrie, as he demonstrates his craft of creating prosthetic eyes.
© Marloes ten Bhömer Courtesy Stanley Picker Gallery
