Tuesday, 14 February 2023
A university School of Education alumna is among artists whose work is being exhibited at Lakeside Arts later this month.
Award-winning artist Mandy Payne, who graduated from the university in 2013, has devoted nine years to paintings focused on Park Hill, Grade II* listed Sheffield council estate, one of Britain’s largest examples of Brutalist architecture.
This work is part of the nationally acclaimed exhibition, Where We Live, which explores the landscape we inhabit today. Presenting five locations across England, the exhibition interrogates our social landscape at a time of profound political and social change, bringing together paintings by Payne, Trevor Burgess, Jonathan Hooper, Narbi Price and Judith Tucker.
Each series of paintings offers the viewer multiple perspectives on the notion of home and our sense of place. Tensions in the images between legacies of the past, the reality of the present and often conflicting visions of the future are layered with poetic texts foregrounding the voices of the residents.
The five locations expose tensions and fault lines inherent to the English landscape
- Park Hill, a large-scale Grade II-listed housing estate in Sheffield. Originally the site of back-to-back housing, Park Hill’s ‘streets in the sky’ were built in the late 1950s to great acclaim. After falling into disrepair in the 1990s, the flats are currently undergoing major redevelopment and renovation.
- The all-but-erased history of Ashington, a post-industrial mining village in Northumberland, that was home to a group of artists known as the “Pitman Painters”.
- Residential architecture in Leeds rendered in modernist colour
- Contested coastal chalet plotlands in North Lincolnshire, whose history goes back to the early 20th century, many of whose residents come from mining communities eviscerated after the 1984 Miners’ Strike.
- Re-imagined images from Estate Agent adverts in paintings that seek to recover everyday urban experience of the street and the notion of home from the commodification of the London property market.
Image credits:
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Jonathan Hooper - Red Brick Terrace On Cardigan Road
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Judith Tucker - Night Fitties Why Destroy A Thing Of Beauty
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Narbi Price - Untitled Phone Box Painting (Comrades)
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Trevor Burgess - A place to live
Each artist raises acute questions of how England’s landscape and architecture is layered over potent legacies of the past, and reveals conflicted visions of the present and the future. In the wake of a pandemic that confined us to our homes, it questions what the idea of home looks and feels like in the midst of multiple displacements and disorientating political, social and environmental change. In doing so, the exhibition foregrounds the voices of the communities who inhabit the depicted locations in spoken texts by poets Harriet Tarlo and Helen Angell.
The exhibition aims to demonstrate how the practice of making paintings in series over an extended period allows the artist to examine the multiple facets and topographies of a place.
The artists
- Trevor Burgess has made residential housing in London the subject of over 60 paintings that obliquely critique contemporary obsessions with housing as a property market commodity.
- Jonathan Hooper has, for over ten years, intensively and exclusively focused his painting on observation of the urban and suburban environment of Leeds.
- Mandy Payne has devoted nine years to paintings focused on Park Hill, Grade II* listed Sheffield council estate, one of Britain’s largest examples of Brutalist architecture.
- Narbi Price’s series of paintings of Ashington, Northumberland, are the product of many hours spent walking the streets of what was once the world’s largest mining village, in the footsteps of the Ashington Group of Pitmen Painters, recording a changed post-industrial landscape that they would barely recognise.
- Judith Tucker’s ongoing series of paintings Night Fitties, are devoted to the chalets on the Humberston Fitties in Lincolnshire as a locus for exploring how notions of place, identity and Englishness are constructed.
Where We Live has been initiated by Trevor Burgess, whose collaborative projects as an artist-curator explore the contemporary practice of painting in a social context. An exhibition catalogue, with introduction by poet and radio presenter, Ian McMillan is available on request for £10.
Where We Live opens at the Angear Visitor Centre, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham, NG7 2RD on Saturday 25 February and continues until Sunday 30 April 2023. Entry to the exhibition is free.
Exhibition preview: 1 to 4pm. Saturday 25 February 2023.
In partnership with Contemporary British Painting.
Story credits
More information is available from Neil Walker, Head of Visual Arts Programming at Lakeside Arts at Neil.walker@nottingham.ac.uk
Notes to editors:
About the University of Nottingham
Ranked 32 in Europe and 16th in the UK by the QS World University Rankings: Europe 2024, the University of Nottingham is a founding member of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities. Studying at the University of Nottingham is a life-changing experience, and we pride ourselves on unlocking the potential of our students. We have a pioneering spirit, expressed in the vision of our founder Sir Jesse Boot, which has seen us lead the way in establishing campuses in China and Malaysia - part of a globally connected network of education, research and industrial engagement.
Nottingham was crowned Sports University of the Year by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide 2024 – the third time it has been given the honour since 2018 – and by the Daily Mail University Guide 2024.
The university is among the best universities in the UK for the strength of our research, positioned seventh for research power in the UK according to REF 2021. The birthplace of discoveries such as MRI and ibuprofen, our innovations transform lives and tackle global problems such as sustainable food supplies, ending modern slavery, developing greener transport, and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.
The university is a major employer and industry partner - locally and globally - and our graduates are the second most targeted by the UK's top employers, according to The Graduate Market in 2022 report by High Fliers Research.
We lead the Universities for Nottingham initiative, in partnership with Nottingham Trent University, a pioneering collaboration between the city’s two world-class institutions to improve levels of prosperity, opportunity, sustainability, health and wellbeing for residents in the city and region we are proud to call home.
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