Get Involved 17, by Sian Watson

Young people in the driving seat with creativity as their vehicle

Get involved 17 is Nottingham Contemporary’s young peoples group. They have witnessed and taken part in a host of unexpected, imaginative and innovative projects, weaving the voice of youth between the walls of Nottingham Contemporary.

The first ever project over two years ago took place before the doors of our gallery had even opened!  The group  set sail with over 300 members of the public to celebrate  the opening of the gallery by creating an armada of  paper boats that sailed across the waters of Old Market Square. 

The group has had a fantastic journey over the last two years, experiencing  adventures in the shape of carrying a stripy sofa across the city collecting conversations, turning The Studio into an application form installation, even causing a coup d’état by staging an  ART FORM election.

Get involved 17 are a peer lead group who have complete freedom in the direction of how their projects travel, taking pride in sharing fresh ideas and perspectives with us. In turn we have support our young people in the process of action research and consultation. Inviting a collective curiosity, openness, and dialogue that allows a shared conversation to grow.

I have been lucky enough to have been involved on this exciting road trip, along the way I have seen them complete the Silver and Gold Arts Award, with their portfolios acknowledged as outstanding levels of achievement. Two of the young people’s portfolios were chosen to be used nationally in Gold art award training as examples of excellence.

We were also invited to visit the US ambassador's residence in London. Marjorie Susman, the ambassador's wife, guided the group around the house in Regent's Park, sharing with them the beautiful modern art collection. They even got to sign in the official US Embassy guest book, their names nestled between the likes of President Obama and Tom Hanks!

Our new project is even more exciting!

We are taking part in the Tate Plus initiative, a programme exploring young people’s engagement with arts and art organisations. Working with 18 organisations across the country such as, Tate Liverpool, Ikon and the BALTIC, Get involved 17 will be helping to create an evaluation tool which can be shared with other galleries and their youth programmes. The group will be looking at  ideas around,  ‘what is quality?’ and how can we evaluate a quality experience?

So, keep your eyes open for events around the city, celebrating what quality means to the Get Involved 17, Nottingham Contemporary and you!

I know that Get involved 17, old and new, have made my life full of quality moments!

Missing Houses and Possible Plans

by Becky Ayre (Researcher, Inheritance Projects)

Support Structure with a Clumber Spaniel and owners 

Clumber is a vast expanse of park, farm and woodland on the Northern borders of Nottinghamshire. Amongst the wildlife, the Serpentine Lake, the campsites and the cycle tracks, there lies a space that exists to remind visitors of what is no longer there. The mansion that once stood at Clumber was demolished in 1938, leaving only traces of itself behind in the landscape that The National Trust would later purchase in 1946 from the people of Worksop, who inherited the grounds from the previous owner, the Duke of Newcastle. Much of the collection of art and furniture was sold off and dispersed around the country and the world, while the bricks were made use of around Nottinghamshire. As the result of a recent period in residence at Clumber, the artists group Support Structure recently seized upon this notable gap in the landscape and the park’s history as an opportunity to invite users of the grounds to imagine new possibilities for the future of the park.

The Residents is a series of artists in residence programmes at three regional National Trust properties, curated by Inheritance Projects in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary, BALTIC and The National Media Museum. The challenge put to the artists/artists group by Inheritance Projects in considering their time in residence, while taking the opportunity to develop their own practice, was to engage critically with the historical and contemporary contexts of the designated properties in order to scrutinize the ways and means that The National Trust protects, preserves and promotes notions of English national heritage. How could an artist working in residence with The National Trust, an organization that holds something of a monopoly over, and responsibility for, the Country’s known social history, challenge or unsettle otherwise dominant narratives in national heritage? While in residence at Clumber, Support Structure (research-architect Celine Condorelli and artist-curator Gavin Wade) met with historians and various users of the park to learn more about the absent house, including how the building was utilised until it was demolished. They also spent time investigating various unrealised proposals for other buildings at Clumber Park and around the world. This led them to discover the story of a house designed by Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe for the Kröller-Müller family in the Netherlands. Although a full-scale fabric and wood structure was erected of the final design for this house, the Kröller-Müllers ultimately decided that the house was unsuitable and it was never built. Between a house that was but no longer is, and a house that never was, Support Structure have imagined new possibilities and stories that resonate in the unfinished histories of such social and architectural ambitions.

Hazel Robinson, Gardener, 1:1000 model of Clumber House, 2011-12

The research undertaken while in residence has accumulated in a series of proposals for changes to the future conditions of Clumber Park, on-site and at Nottingham Contemporary- the partner institution for the residency. These proposals are presented in a new publication, co-published by Nottingham Contemporary and distributed to all visitors at Clumber Park and are aimed at discovering and producing new stories, generating new ideas in a manner that seeks to support new social and communitarian potentials for the site where Clumber’s mansion once stood. The publication’s launch on February 24^th at Nottingham Contemporary will be with a panel of presentations aimed at further illuminating the threads of research pulled out by Support Structure from Clumber’s varied history, and from the story of the unrealized house in the Netherlands. A weekend-long programme of events from Nottingham Contemporary and Clumber will follow.

Decoding Monkey: Entering the Hall of Mirrors

By Wayne Burrows

Decoding Monkey at Nottingham Contemporary 24 June 7pm – late. Free

First aired in Japan under its kanji title 西遊記 (Saiyūki) in 1978, Monkey was dubbed for the British market by the BBC the following year and – placed into a kid-friendly teatime slot - made what had previously been a distinctly Chinese legend into part of the folklore of several generations of British, American and Australian children. It’s the story of a Stone Monkey who learns magic, rises to kingship, tricks his way into Heaven, causes chaos, gets stuck under a mountain for 500 years and is given a chance to redeem himself by helping a monk on a journey to India to retreive scriptures.

The cartoonish style of the Japanese TV series is sometimes thought to be slightly disrespectful of the original novel’s sacred concerns, but the truth is - if the English Modernist poet Arthur Waley’s 1942 translation of Wu Ch’Eng-En’s fifteenth century text is anything to go by - the story is pretty cartoonish anyway, an episodic tale of monsters, fighting and human vices magnified in the mirrors of Gods and Demons, all served up with lashings of magic. The Buddhist homilies and bizarre situations, the clowning and kung-fu, are all right there in the original text.

Nowhere is the style of Monkey – both book and TV show - better appreciated than in the first episode, Monkey Goes Wild About Heaven, the story’s foundation and origin myth in which the trickster rapidly evolves from animal to Great Sage, Equal Of Heaven, gets punished, fails to learn his lesson and acquires his peculiar band of fellow pilgrims: the saintly monk Tripitaka (a man confusingly but perfectly played in the series by a woman, Natsume Masako), a dragon-horse, lustful pig-monster and a reformed but morose cannibal. We’ll be screening this very episode in full as the final act of Decoding Monkey.


Before we get to that, though, the story of Monkey’s own eventful journey from East to West will be unravelled, taking in Chinese oral tradition, animal symbolism, Ming Dynasty bureaucracy, the English Modernist circle gathered around Ezra Pound in the 1920s, the popularity of Bruce Lee’s breakthrough 1970s kung-fu films and the Group Sounds music scene in 1960s Tokyo, which among other things, hatched Monkey himself, the actor and singer Masaaki Sakai, when he played a key role in The Spiders, Japan’s answer to the Beatles, Monkees and Rolling Stones, all at once.
It’s a story, in other words, that’s every bit as cartoonish, full of digressions and downright unlikely as the one told in the pages of Wu Ch’Eng-En’s novel, and its many byways will hopefully cast some useful light on the symbolism and thinking behind the work by Huang Yong Ping – an artist who made his own Journey to the West - in the upstairs galleries. I’ll be doing my best to untangle these many threads in The Space on June 24 and I hope you’ll be ready to join me.

Wayne Burrows

Store Room Cupboard Cinema

Helena Tomlin is Head of Learning at Nottingham Contemporary

A couple of months ago during the Anne Collier and Jack Goldstein exhibition this spring, Phil Wise the Deputy Head at Larkfields Junior in Broxtowe rang me to talk about joining one of our Free Twilight Planning Sessions for Teachers. We run these on a regular basis for all teachers across all Key Stages. Our artist educators introduce resources and ideas that can be used to develop work in the gallery for ‘self-led’ sessions to give teachers confidence to run workshops themselves.



After a wide ranging chat and brainstorm over a cup of coffee here at the Gallery Phil decided he would send the whole school staff to work with us! The upshot of the meeting was a plan to develop their Arts Week in school in response to Nottingham Contemporary and the exhibitions on show at the time.

The results of this inspiring collaboration can be seen at http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/films-and-photographs-larkfields-junior-school

I went along to school to experience the Arts Week myself. After navigating my way to the correct motorway exit (I’m new to Nottingham still!) I was welcomed into the school and spent a happy hour watching the films they had made in a cinema created from clearing out a school store room...Phil had developed it into a wonderful pop-up screening space and I together with parents and families of the children involved took it in turns to enjoy a full viewing.

Although I’ve been working in arts education for over 20 years now, it has been a while since I have seen such a well thought out piece of work completed within a short time frame. What made the Arts Week so successful was Phil and his team’s ability to capture the excitement and evident fun all the children had in the making of the work. At Nottingham Contemporary we are keen to make visible the processes and practice of contemporary art making, and this project certainly delivered on this key theme.

The children and teachers had all taken on board the ideas generated by the two artists. These included thinking about repetition, suspense and a focus on one key element. To see more of Jack Goldstein and Anne Collier’s work at Nottingham Contemporary take a look at http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org/art/1/past

I’m excited about what other schools in Nottingham will come up with after training with us and I’ll keep you all posted with further news!