Oh No! Where’s My Show?
08/07/21 - 15/07/21
Open Daily 12-6pm
One Thoresby Street
NG1 1AJ
One Thoresby Street presents ‘Oh No! Where’s My Show?’, an exhibition organised by the graduating cohort of Nottingham Trent’s Fine Art Course. A wide ranging exhibition, featuring over 45 of the graduates, the show celebrates their time on the course, featuring work which is the culmination of 3 years of development.
The show exists not only as a marker of their passing into post graduate life, but also as a statement of resilience and commendable dedication despite the setbacks the current situation presents. This dedication has been visible not only during their degree but also in the run up to the exhibition, with the organisers enthusiastically facing the challenge head on. It’s been a pleasure to work with these graduates, and OTS is glad to play a part in presenting the results of their hard work. As always it’s also encouraging to see the cohort full of exciting young artists, all of whom we look forward to watching flourish going forwards!
From the students:
‘Fine Art courses are lengthy and intense within normal circumstances, but the past year has brought about new challenges for Fine Art students around the world. From muted microphones and bedroom studios to the isolation and loss of loved ones, it has been an experience of varying difficulties and hardships beyond normality for all.
‘Oh No! Where’s My Show?’, in both its physical and digital form, symbolises so much more than it shows. Not only does it bear the traditional celebration and relief of any graduation show, but it is naturally furthered with a sense of relief and commemoration for all students involved.
We would like to thank lecturers, technicians, and staff at Nottingham Trent University for their work over the past three academic years, and OTS for their hosting and helping of a show that otherwise would not have been able to go ahead. Lastly, we would like to thank those engaging with our work in ways that seemed so far away just this time last year.
To all students involved: congratulations on your hard work, perseverance, and final outcomes in both their physical and digital forms. Enjoy your show, your successes, and whatever the future holds in all of its creativity and unpredictability.’
ALEX BARRETT
The themes of my work are based in identity and anonymity - exploring the human mind and appearance. My main interests revolve around queerness, often touching on political subjects such as feminism, LGBTQ+ rights and witchcraft. Where discussions seem difficult, I use imagery, poetry and sound to communicate key issues.
The human body is an important image I experiment with, whether taking inspiration from, or recreating it. I have used art as a form of therapy and attempt to cast light on everyday struggles such as gender, sexuality and mental health. These are topics I, plus a significant percentage of people face, and I hope to raise awareness within my practice.
I use a range of mediums - including paint, sound and sculptural materials - often in collaboration, to create installations with unique atmospheres. I use research to fuel my creative process, as learning other points of view and collecting information is incredibly important to me.
JASMINE BETTS
My interest is in community and how that makes me feel. I explore the relationship between British subcultures and the political, social and economic issues that informed them, through large scale paintings. Visually my work experiments with the concept of drawing the viewer in with the use of vivid colour and energetic brush strokes to create atmosphere and chaos to deal with the concept of escapism in relation to oppression. I use religious paintings as building blocks for my work to deal with the power dynamic between oppressor and oppressed. This creating a correlation between the historic power dynamic that religious paintings hold due to the power of the church over ‘the people’, with the power dynamic between the people of the UK now and in modern history with the oppressive governing body at the time.
IZZI BURNETT
Izzi Burnett utilises analogue photography within a fine art context to explore themes of purity and virginity, the historical and religious oppression of women’s sexuality, and how the pressure of these societal constructs can have a lasting psychological impact. Man-made interventions within natural landscapes serve as metaphor for the constructed concepts of purity and virginity. By using the physically evident human interventions as allegory for intangible/invisible virginity, she makes a mental struggle visible. Burnett also uses corsetry as a symbol of female oppression—historical corsets are often used in film and television to exemplify oppression of women through the physical restriction of the corset. In some of her photographs Burnett wears a corset she adapted from an 1890s Victorian pattern. By rejecting the ideals associated with corsets while wearing one, she uses this symbol of oppression as a tool to free herself.
MATTIAS CARTER
They/them
Sculptor
Emotional experience within the body
A focus on repetition and long processes
Form deconstructed
An absence of colour highlighting shape and form
Delicate in approach
Involving the body but never as the body itself
Letting materials speak for themselves
A space for solace in the universality of human experience
TOMAS COBBETT
Cobbett is an interdisciplinary concept artist, with a focus on exploring facets of identity through performance, film, and sculpture. Drawing on their own Queer experience to reflect on the “othered body”; Cobbett’s work hinges on a destabilisation of the normative, with a strong belief that anything supposed as natural is propped on a colonial system of white patriarchy.
With a whimsical fascination to a child’s development through play. Centring intersections of gender, their work aims to destabilise concrete notions of self in favour of a Queer potentiality, allowing freedom of fluidity and spectrum to every aspect of our embodiment.
Provocative of joyful inquisition, Cobbett keeps distance between intended concept and artistic outcome to allow space for the audience to establish their own narratives and relation to the art, the only constant being the unstable.
SAMMY DWYER
Sammy Dwyer is an Artist who focuses his practice on the exploration of dreams and dream imagery. Though primarily working in paint he also explores ideas in other forms of media such as drawings in pencil and oil pastel. Taking inspiration from the psychological works of Jung and Freud he explores ideas of what it is we see when we dream by recording his own dreams and presenting them in the form of images. He enjoys the way that memories and dreams bleed into one another and the way they evolve and decay as you remember and forget parts. Just as a dream is a free flowing and disjointed experience so too are his paintings which use a mixture of painting techniques such as thin washes and thickly pushed paint. His paintings are bold and colourful with depictions of exotic shapes, places and situations.
Space is out there, and I am its master. In time it will come to know me and the power I hold. As god created the universe so too shall I with a 2 inch brush.
ABI ELIZABETH
Using brightly coloured crochet Abi creates soft spaces in an effort to explore the relationship between restrictive capitalist culture and the light escapism necessary to feel a sense of personhood in an ever-expecting world. Keeping her practise second-hand is key to its integrity, rejecting consumption practises in order to have valid commentary. Abi takes on trends that place the individual at the heart of the climate conversation and uses soft sculpture to highlight the dissuasion this commentary presents. Abi is influenced by current dialogue around our environmental crisis and fibre artists whose woven pieces aim to bring joy. She is interested in the idea of collectivised living, sharing space, resources, and knowledge freely for collective improvement and believes creating art in ethical and accessible ways moves towards that goal.
STEFANI ERMOGENIDOU
Stefani Ermogenidou is working within the boundaries between design, art, and architecture. She is using a wide variety of mediums including drawing, sculpture, installation, photography, and weaving. In her latest works, Stefani, captivated by the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of linear compositions, questions the relationship between a sculpture and a drawing by using the line as the key element of her practice. Lines on lines cause an interception; a mark-making. The way the lines take on space affects the human experience. They express unconsciously dysphoric states, that are transferred onto the paper using detailed marks. A line is a transparent tool we use to map our surroundings. Her practise involves the translation of two-dimensional representations to physical models. She is interested in how objects get flattened into drawings and on the contrary, how these drawings could possibly unfold into functional objects. Through her work, she attempts to understand the dynamics of landscape, both physical and social, and our position within it, by investigating it through materiality, light, surfaces, and layers. Her practice brings together parallels, forming an ongoing discussion between the personal, the geopolitical, and the architectural.
CHARLOTTE FALKINGHAM
For the majority of her practice, multi-disciplinary artist Charlotte
Falkingham has created emotionally raw installations based upon her
own personal childhood trauma. By contextualising the pain and the
lasting effects of an abusive childhood with an alcoholic and
narcissistic parent, she uses her artwork to reflect upon her past life
experiences as a therapeutic outlet to start to heal from years of
abuse. Charlotte challenges the notion of a “broken home” and how
a person is not defined by their trauma but how they heal from it.
But also challenging the darker aspects of growing up in an unsafe
environment and how that can deeply affect an individual and the
way they treat others by dissecting the stigma and fear behind it and
addressing it.
Charlotte does this by expanding her image past the frame and into
the environment around it, consuming the wall entirely. She does
this with her expressive brush strokes and powerful text, using
quotes from real conversations she creates a dialogue between her
abuser, herself and outside opinions which are also represented in
the multiple eye motifs throughout her work.
ROSIE GHALE-SOLTANI
Rosie is a mixed media artist currently looking at how hair holds a variety of contradictions as a material. The focus of her installation and sculptural work is understand audience reaction and to question why we react to material and experiences in the way we do. Immersion is an integral element to achieving such reactions and challenges the contradictions of the material, this is done by pushing the boundaries of traditional presentation.
KEIRA HANCOCK
Defining artwork fascinates me. My work is about the manipulation of materials to question the ‘normal’ boundaries between sculpture and painting. My aim is to create a physical enquiry. Staging is vital as I feel that the properties of work and the relationship between the way it is presented, heavily influences how artwork is perceived and interpreted. By creating abstract pieces of art using materials such as plaster, chicken wire, mod roc, foam and paint I create work which makes the viewer question what is defined as a sculpture or painting. Can it be both, neither or even defined at all?
GABRIEL HARRIS
I am a radical advocate for care, tenderness, queer liberation, and the crip future. I make work to present the lived experience of my disabled, autistic, genderfuck bodymind. My works are the outcomes of BDSM scenes—during which I push my body to its limits; undergoing repetitive, labour-intensive processes which purposefully aggravate my chronic pain.
Coming together in two parts, I make interactive sculpture, furniture, bodyessays, writing, and performances. Part One centralises materiality as extension of the body, masochistically creating objects fitting my dimensions and imbued with my experience. This often involves scavenging and finding, transformations of materials and objects, emotion, and pain. Part Two is, by design, out of my control. Taking the audience from viewer to participant, I use the audience’s bodies to perform with the objects created in Part One.
Any work which references or engages the body inescapably brings forth questions of dis/ability, sexuality, and gender, and my work appropriates these in order to queer the normal experience of interacting.
LUCY HEPKE
Red lips, painted nails, fluffy hair and a glass of wine.
She dances from room to room. She performs for herself. She performs on herself.
The dishes do not go undone and she is not unhappy to do them. She is comfortable within the home environment, without letting the mundanity of household chores undermine her sexuality. She is both. With a sexual spin on hoovering the back-room she turns housework into a performance of glamour, determination and desire.
She seeks liberation in naked cleaning. To clean for herself. To cook for herself.
Sitting uncomfortably within the uncanny.
ANNA HODGSON
In her textile installations, Anna explores the realm of connectivity in the wider world by observing organically created patterns that mirror patterns in expansive nature. Such patterns resemble formations in fungi to plants to the symmetry in how birds fly and fish swim. Anna uses repetitive domestic processes like sewing to produce unpredictable patterns which ultimately mimic nature, and perhaps expose the careful design of the universe expressed in Chinese religions like Taoism as ‘the way’. This contemplation can be seen specifically in biomorphic patterns that appear in her work. Alongside her artistic enquiries, enjoyment characterises the other half of Anna’s practice. The arts hopes to provide a pleasurable sensory experience for her audience that she herself encounters from her tactile sculptures.
LACHLAN HUI
As a multi-medium creative, Lachlan Hui modifies everyday materials -sticky notes written by strangers, annotated library books, glass bottles he once drank from- into ambitious, collective documentations concerning about the nature of communication and interpretation. Initially influenced by print making mediums for its connection with communication. He would often apply printing techniques within his projects, transforming ordinary objects he has accumulated over a period of time into holistic reflections of social and cultural phenomena behind various communication practices. From printing with sticky notes to sending out messages in bottles, their creation process involves varying extent of participation, illustrating the public’s impact reshaping the communication geography through usage.
PAKHEE JHA
The aesthetic and expressiveness of the human form is a primary inspiration to Pakhee’s art. Concepts around history, visual memory and literature often comprise the themes she works with, figuration acting as a medium for their conveyance. Having a natural palette of warm, bright and earthy tones, she tells stories through characterization of people and places, although with changing technicality. She wants her audience to be confronted with a playful/curious narrative that references the viewer while delivering the main characteristic of its subject. Her work aims to reveal the commonly unseen, or highlight those aspects of a story that are often overlooked. Working from imagination and sometimes photos, Pakhee enjoys creating narratives that might not be identifiable as either fact or fiction, changing subtly with each spectator. Essentially, she makes what she loves, and wants that to reach all her viewers.
AMBER JONES
Amber Jones is an installation artist displaying language through ceramics and everyday objects. Jones explores the link between reality and the personal experience, through their own personal lens of derealisation and depersonalisation, symptoms caused by high levels of anxiety which make it seem like their surroundings and themself are not quite real. Due to derealisation affecting the perception of their environment and causing a lack of distinction between dreams and reality, their work often has aspects of a dream-like nature. Jones aims to pass on the experience of anxious thoughts, distant realities, and self-consciousness by building installations that encase the viewer, allowing them to live for a while within the work rather than just view it.
TOM KAUFMAN
Tom Kaufman is a multidisciplinary artist investigating the microcosm of cells inside our bodies constantly moving versus the macrocosm of our bodies themselves dancing to music. He explores themes including rave culture, cell biology, space and abstraction through mediums such as spray paint, acrylics and inks. Inspired by rave characteristics like heavy bass music and flashing lights, he incorporates self made sound pieces and light into his artworks bringing this lively atmosphere to a gallery space.
Exploring the possible interactions between space, body and time, Kaufman showcases the energetic atmosphere that rave culture offers, relating this to the way cells jitter around our bodies.
Movement is an important part of Kaufman’s practice, influenced by the theory of humans having a predisposed desire to dance to express emotion. He looks at the evolution of humanity’s relationship with the motion of dancing and how it is a spiritual practice and part of life.
LEWIS MARTIN
I consider my dreams immersive experiences only I can fully understand. Even when I don’t understand what causes these dreams to happen, I comprehend the emotional response I have in the moment and upon waking. My practice is informed by the visceral experience of lucid dreaming and my work is a visual response that attempts to create an equivalent experience of the exact emotion I had whilst having the dream using film and installation.
EMMIE MORRIS
Emmie Morris is a writer artist currently based in Nottingham. Her practice revolves around auto-theory, the combination of criticism within a narrative voice, personal experience and how the voice can switch positionality. Within her written work she aims to push hybrid forms of writing, combining together poetry, prose, fiction and non-fiction to show how writing can fit within the context of contemporary art today.
AMELIA OULTON
Amelia Oulton is a figurative painter based in the UK, working with collage and acrylic paint. Her paintings are bold and vibrant, interrogating the imagery and status associated with social media, and its role in how women represent themselves in the public sphere. Amelia challenges the imagery of popular culture, playing with the visual representation of women found in both mass media and social media that we, as a turbo-consumer society are constantly surrounded with. In particular, she explores how the mass media’s representation of women in the modern world shapes how they present themselves in the public sphere - specifically on social media, and how this plays into self-objectification.
LOUI PENFOLD
A painting can be seen as finished or complete, but the overall process of painting is ever going, that it will never have an end goal. It’s a lifelong concept where a finished painting will simply evolve into something else. I am a figurative painter who explores my personal experiences through expressive and gestural mark marking. I am primarily a painter who works on canvas but can be known to incorporate found materials within my work in the form of expanded painting. A process that is an approach between intuition with the materials and personal narrative. Similarly, my unusual printing methods which include using tools such as jars, scrunched up paper etc. can be seen to create colourful backgrounds that often highlight my heavy use of line work. Layering and texture become a big part of my practise, creating abstracted figures with an underlying dark tone which may leave the spectator questioning the contexts behind the work.
KASEY RENAGHAN
Kasey Renaghan is captivated by unusual, offcut, and imperfect trees which leads her to take away and reuse every part of the material to reveal its true nature in a sculptural form. Her process led practice exhibits a celebration of transience and change; a perfect piece of wood cannot be improved upon, but it can be destroyed to tell you something new about it. Distancing herself from traditional industry and consumerism whilst exploring materials place in hierarchy produces pieces that question matter, material, and materialism. The goal is to suspend viewers in time, questioning which materials are real or fake and how their preconceived ideas affect this.
MARC RICHARDSON
“Constructed Situations”, a term coined by Tino Sehgal, is a concept that Marc Richardson has reinvented, consciously using multiple disciplines including photography and digital media, as a form of socially engaged art to explore masculinity. Richardson’s practice functions to stimulate discussions and significantly unique experiences via audience participation, intersubjectivity and ephemerality to explore certain complexities of masculinity. Each “Constructed Situation” develops into the next to explore the influence of the media on queer culture, addressing socio-political issues such as male objectification, male body standards and queer masculinity.
COLETTE ROGERS
Colette Rogers is an abstract expressionist painter and installation artist. Rogers’ uses painting to meditate on the futilities and vitalities of life, and death, inspired by the Japanese tradition of Hanami. Through reflecting on her personal experiences as a woman, her canvas sizes are made to specific measurements relating to her body. This scale allows her to play around with ‘the size of herself’, contemplating ego and her position as a female abstract painter. There is a pushing and pulling of delicacy and dominance in her work – the harsh lines of the canvas frames contrast with the soft colour palettes inspired by cherry blossom in springtime. Rogers’ takes pleasure in the craftmanship of making from start to finish, thus makes all canvases by hand. The history of movement shown in the canvas and its content show the humanness of creation – wanting transparency and honesty in what she does to bring forth a rejection of perfection and mass production.
MATT SAUNDERS
it’s a contradiction, an exploitation, a filtration, an abstraction
anxious – uncertain transformations of thought and feeling
disembodied ambiguous journeys
light-hearted emotional-political-existential reflections
interchangeable combinations of word, sound, image
theatrical stream of consciousness – discovering, creating, altering “meaning”
KEREN SMITH
My practice holds in tension co-existing, co-dependent opposites: life and death, beauty and repulsion, physicality and spirituality. Symbolism from nature aids my exploration of these themes, and I fluctuate between playful and serious attitudes towards them (I can’t quite decide whether everything is meaningless or nothing is).
My oil paintings are born out of interactions with various picture-objects of personal significance to me (photos, birthday cards, magazine cuttings etc.), which I use to explore my own history and psyche by grouping and connecting images and ideas.
Recently I connected photographs of myself to the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood’s famously redheaded muses, with whom I became well acquainted throughout my childhood via museum-gift-shop birthday cards. These historical references are brought into a contemporary setting with a subtle mixture of reverence and satire. Their poses and expressions are mimicked and exaggerated as I investigate the complexities of my personal relationship to these images, both as an artist and as a woman.
DANIEL STREETER
Moving away from tangible objects to describe the material world, Daniel Streeter’s practice has exploded into a fully non-objective form of description, exploring the spaces scientists and mathematicians are investigating. Spatial metaphors, technical processes and organic forms continually inform his large-scale paintings, resulting in visually confusing canvases that hint at the complexity of his process.
The layering and formation of lattice networks, alongside their relationship with their painterly qualities becomes the portal to metaphysical exploration within the work.
The paintings create an impression of hardly constrained chaos. Tension on the canvas is integral in creating chaos and to maintain its prevalence across his paintings. The traction is a product of organised structures and fluid forms, that when coexisting, induce a chaotic nature in the work.
His paintings are an attempt at being resonant in some way. Maybe resonant in the absurdity of our existence, the absurd condition of looking for meaning in a seemingly meaningless universe. An endless exploration that informs his work.
TRYUMPH
Tryumph is a state-of-the-art pharmaceutical company analysing and providing instances of reflection and reconnection to communities around the modern world.
We are dedicated to our core belief: all people deserve expansive lives, enriched through all that they consume. This enrichment is the foundation of our creations, defying conventions deeply rooted in the post-modern world.
The functionality of our pharmaceuticals revolves around the individual being removed and reinstalled into reality. Instances of reflection are posed by this process, establishing an influential remedy for all involved.
Tryumph’s is based around well-practised and widely comprehensible production methods, an unmatched transparency that sustains the trust and satisfaction of those we remedy. From our pharmaceuticals to our staff conduct, we strive to continuously provide a beneficial and embracing experience that develops the world beyond what is already in existence.
For enquiries and feedback: info@tryumph.co.uk
LUKE WATTERS
I am the maker and narrator. I am longing to share my tinkering with the world, taking this opportunity to throw my pebble in the pond in order to see if an undulating ripple can be formed.
Once upon a time there was a maker trapped in his tower due to a mysterious curse, with only the help of his great modern-day Hephaestus, 3D printing, helping him bring magic to life. The artistic maker dances with ideas of how art, the realms of storytelling and play are synonymously linked.
As the adventure unfolds, it becomes clear that the artist has to venture out across many new lands of videography, animation, sculpture and digital design. Obstacles and battles continuously ensue, but the artist strives onward, never defeated, believing there is always a way to overcome darkness. Forever determined to bring work to life, the artistic maker never gives up hope. Here lieth some of his ideas… but as always, the journey still continues, and the adventure never ends…
ZOE WESTON
Zoe Weston is a multi-medium artist currently based in East Midlands U.K. Her work centres around reconceptualising the human experience of nature and ecology. Drawing inspiration from the natural world, recording this using photography and film. She uses different technology 3-D scanning, 3-D apps and augmented reality to produce moving image films along with sound recorded from the site.
The artist “I suppose you could say, I have a curiosity of sci-fi and the natural world, combining these makes for both uncanny and beautiful results. I love to create immersive worlds that draws the audience in, by doing this I think we can open a dialogue of thought about our ecological future”.
KIA WHITCOMBE
Saturated flesh replaces the commodity, questioning our deformed appetites.
The fluctuating rhythm unhinges.
Film and material possess the space, communicating the limitless nature of the inanimate and the digital.
Her subjects perform maliciously. Then cautiously. Our perception of the consumerist woman looking for true vitality is redefined.
Imitating the technological climate we find ourselves in – aesthetically inviting, subliminally dark – Kia Whitcombe explores a concern for idolization within a capitalist society.
CHLOE WILLIS
Chloe Willis is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Nottingham. Her work takes the form of poetry-activated performance and installations, incorporating elements of film, audios, sculptural and 2d mediums.
The themes of her work are wide ranging due to the often personal, diaristic process of the poetry writing that form the script of her works; informed by the immediacy of emotional expression though poetics and an ongoing viewing and participation of performance poetry live events.
Her interest in the psychological, philosophical, vulnerability and emotivity in art and poetry leads her work to being centered around relationships and love, mental health and illness and transitions of emotion and states of being.
EDEN WOOD
I’m in constant fear that I’m not doing enough, I’m not being productive and I’m a failure. I make art as my way to escape all the thoughts spinning around my brain. I use play as a way to turn my brain off. The materials, colours and shapes I use throughout my work are all very intuitive, never pre-planned and each one produced as a response to the last; it puts me in this strange meditative space. This is something I try to recreate for the viewer, using my abstract artwork to captivate the audience, creating a space for them to ‘just be’ for a while.