Kaleidoscopic Realms
This group exhibition, co-curated by a-n member Christopher Samuel, features work by eight artists from across the UK. Works range from Nnena Kalu’s large-scale, energetic drawings that resemble tornadoes, to delicate embroideries depicting animals and nature by James Gladwell, and Richard Hunt’s fluid paintings that evoke underwater scenes.
Cameron Morgan’s joyful ceramic cameras come complete with glazed pottery photographs and colourful rolls of films, along with vibrantly embroidered straps; Siddharth Gadiyar’s huge abstract paintings feature recurring motifs of concentric circles and lines; while Michelle Roberts’ methodical, repetitive approach produces engrossing worlds of pattern and colour.
Thompson Hall’s graphic paintings are inspired by current affairs, reflecting social and political issues and acting as calls to action against injustice, while a love of popular culture is evident in Leslie Thompson’s densely detailed drawings of imagined scenes. In one, from a series titled Many of the TV Screens Everywhere, characters from the A-Team gather around a TV, watching the King’s Coronation.
Until 3 November 2024, Nottingham Castle nottinghamcastle.org.uk
Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair
Numerous a-n members are among the 200 artists, designers and makers showcasing their work and demonstrating their skills at the UK’s biggest craft show.
Leicester-based glass blower GR Hawes combines traditional techniques with contemporary forms in his handcrafted glass sculptures; British Pakistani ceramicist Aamir Nehal makes vases and tiles that celebrate colour and culture in their handpainted surfaces; while Scottish goldsmith Yvonne Gilhooly presents a new collection of jewellery.
As well as highlighting the breadth of contemporary craft and design practices in the UK today, the fair celebrates emerging talent, with two exhibitions. Great Northern Graduates features 12 new makers to watch, while Green Grads presents work by 20 recent graduates who work with innovative, sustainable and environmentally low-impact materials and ideas.
18 – 20 October 2024, Victoria Baths, Manchester greatnorthernevents.co.uk
Beneath the Surface: George Stubbs & Contemporary Artists
a-n member Jo Longhurst takes part in this group exhibition that places historic paintings by George Stubbs (1724 – 1806) alongside works by contemporary artists, whose work explores animal and human experiences.
Several photographic works by Longhurst are on display, including from the series The Refusal, which focuses on the competitive world of dog shows, to explore ideas of power, control, love and desire.
Taking a slow and collaborative approach on projects that often play out over many years, Longhurst’s work explores traditions of portraiture, and critiques theories of representation, gender and eugenics.
In an interview with a-n from 2023, Longhurst said: “When I started with the dogs, I was looking at breeds and thinking about race and class and ideas of ‘perfection’. And how much emphasis there is in photography about getting the perfect shot.”
Until 3 November 2024, Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham wentworthwoodhouse.org.uk
Mary Mary
Among the nine women artists showing work in this outdoor sculpture exhibition are a-n members Rong Bao, Candida Powell–Williams, Alice Wilson, Frances Richardson and Holly Stevenson.
The show positively reframes the characterisation (in nursery rhymes and elsewhere) of forceful women as ‘contrary’, while exploring and subverting architectural and historical aspects of the Artists Garden.
Holly Stevenson’s Another Mother (2022) replaces a lost stone baluster in the Garden’s perimeter, to celebrate the untold, invisible, unpaid but essential support roles of women; Rong Bao’s ‘infinite pathway’ is inspired by the tactile yellow paving slabs used to guide visually impaired people around cities; while Candida Powell-Williams’ presents a functioning but ‘unruly’ fountain that subverts the stability of classical fountain geometry.
By its nature the Artists Garden proposes a new and rich sculptural language for public space and a reclamation of space by women: it occupies a half-acre roof terrace on top of Temple tube station, which is now the world’s first sculpture garden dedicated to the work of women artists.
3 October 2024 – September 2025, Artist’s Garden, London thecolab.art
Naomi Frears: Night After Night
This solo exhibition by St Ives-based a-n member Naomi Frears features new paintings and works on paper, with subjects including sleeping figures, imagined landscapes, plants and trees.
In Night After Night, the artist addresses her ‘paused paintings’ – works that have become stuck, “often for quite a long time as I try to work out how to solve the visual problem I’ve made,” she says.
During continued bouts of insomnia, Frears has worked at ‘unsticking’ these paintings, both in the studio and in her head at night: She explains: “It’s been a bit like untying a difficult knot and then tying a new one. I’ve been happy taking the paintings back to a state of nakedness and heading off in another direction in order to find out what’s possible. Sometimes the upheaval is visible and sometimes it’s under the surface.”
Until 2 November 2024, Kestle Barton, Helston kestlebarton.co.uk
Sonia Boyce: An Awkward Relation
Bringing together pivotal and rarely seen works by a-n member Sonia Boyce, this exhibition explores themes of interaction, participation and improvisation, in dialogue with Whitechapel’s concurrent exhibition of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark, ‘The I and the You’.
Several works showcase Boyce’s fascination with hair as a material and cultural signifier. The 50 collages from Black Female Hairstyles (1995) and the video work Exquisite Tension (2005), along with a number of photographic works, document and explore hair through the lens of race and gender.
Similar themes are evident in 20 pieces from the 1990s that are made from real and synthetic hair. Visitors are invited to touch and respond to them instinctively and directly, highlighting Boyce’s interest in how feelings of involvement and uneasiness may surface when experiencing artworks in “unscripted ways.”
2 October 2024 – 12 January 2025, Whitechapel Gallery, London whitechapelgallery.org
Adham Faramawy: And these deceitful waters
a-n member Adham Faramawy’s solo exhibition features recent moving image pieces that examine hidden histories of rivers and reveal their roles as politically contested sites.
Film installation Birds of Sorrow (2024) brings together the social and political histories of the waterways around Dagenham, the birds that live along the river, mythology, and the changing ecology of the area.
Meanwhile video and sculptural assemblage And these deceitful waters explores the history of the Thames as a colonial artery through which materials, goods and looted treasures flowed from colonised countries to the heart of the British Empire. Through fluid, interwoven narratives, the work spotlights the ways in which national identity, landscapes and waterways are used in projects of nation-building: a process which is always subject to ongoing change.
2 October 2024 – 4 January 2025, Focal Point Gallery, Southend-on-Sea fpg.org.uk
Dust to Dust
Stafford-based Phoebe Cummings presents an installation made from raw clay alongside photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) and textile sculptures by Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017), in this exhibition that explores the relationship between the organic world and the human body.
All three artists engage directly with the seemingly decorative tradition of flowers to ask deeper and questions about the world, tenderness and transience of life.
Cummings’ installations of unfired clay highlight the material’s fragility and usually depict botanical forms, to evoke ideas of impermanence and decay. The works are time-based in the sense that they are often dissolved after an exhibition, or sometimes change form over its course, depending on the inherent fragility of the structure. Referencing fragile relics of past and future histories, Cummings’ works frequently return themselves to dust.
Until 2 November 2024, Sid Motion Gallery, London sidmotiongallery.co.uk
Top image: Nnena Kalu, Drawing 72, 2023, acrylic pen, graphite, and pen on paper, 90x170cm x3 works. Courtesy of the artist and ActionSpace
