Diane Arbus at Nottingham Contemporary

Earlier this month, I paid my first visit to the new Nottingham Contemporary to catch the tail-end of the Diane Arbus exhibition. This exhibition is one of the Artist Rooms circulating shows and will be shown at Aberdeen Art Gallery and Tate Modern early in 2011.

This is not reversed, the signage has been painted that way

Nottingham Contemporary is very conveniently located only a few yards away from the upper level exit from the Broadmarsh Shopping Centre. It is a curious-looking building. Whatever delights it may contain in the way of exhibitions, the building itself has an aggressive, forbidding exterior. Its relatively windowless outside walls are painted a drab camouflage green, making it look like a casemate or fortified gun emplacement. One could well imagine that it would look quite at home along the Maginot Line or among the World War II defences of the Normandy Coastline. Like those structures, it is a multi-level building built down into the ground, descending into a disused railway cutting where the old Great Central Railway once entered a tunnel that burrowed deep beneath the heart of the city. 

Maybe it's my ageing eyesight, but I completely missed the main entrance, which is part of the long glass wall beneath the overhang in the lower photograph. Having walked straight past it without seeing that one part of the glass wall was a door, I went down the outside stairs to a patio outside the lower level. There, I could get into the gallery café and up the inside stairs to the main exhibition area.

Once inside the gallery, the exhibition lived up to all the positive reports I'd heard from the students who had already been to see it. Given that her work is so well-known, there is little I feel I can add except to note the pleasure of looking at first-generation and vintage prints of images usually seen as reproductions in books. The classic images we know so well – the identical twins and the boy with the hand grenade – were all there alongside a wealth of images that give an idea of a much broader range to her work.

 

While all of her work draws our attention to what the exhibition leaflet calls 'the unusual in the ordinary', many of her photographs avoid an emphasis on the grotesque and freakish and 'reflect her broader interest in the rituals and customs of self-contained groups'. In this, it is easy to see the inspiration she drew from the documentary portraiture of August Sander, whose influence she readily acknowledged. 

It was an exhibition that would repay a second visit, so it will be a pleasure to go and see it when it travels to London in March alongside what should be an equally fascinating exhibition on the work of Joseph Beuys.

Stone Fruit

It is a stone fruit. Each one yields me a thought. I come nearer to the maker of it than if I found his bones.
The metaphor was Thoreau's, writing in his journal about the Indian arrowheads he would find in the freshly cultivated fields around Concord, Massachusetts. However, he was making a broader point about the importance of being aware of the historical evidence that surrounds us.

It is too easy to overlook Cromford in Derbyshire as you speed along the busy A6 towards the more obvious charms of Matlock and Matlock Bath. This busy arterial road, once one of the nation's most important highways, bisects the community, leaving the village on one side of the road and the remnants of its industry on the other. Both are largely hidden by the rocky and wooded landscape on either side of the road.

While the village is well worth exploring, it is the Mill buildings that mark a key stage in the early development of the factory system of production.

The first mill on this site was built in 1771 by Richard Arkwright to mass-produce cotton yarns for weaving. The mill was powered by water from a lead mine drain and a warm thermal spring, giving a reliable year-round source of power. Arkwright's spinning machines were known as 'water frames', after their source of power. The weaving industry for which these yarns were produced was still a cottage industry and the surplus of yarns that Arkwright was able to produce provided a spur for innovations in weaving and the supply of constant and reliable power by water and steam.

The Mill is maintained by the Arkwright Society. It's a great place to visit and spend half a day at least. A nice tearoom, bookshops, walking or just chill out by the banks of the old canal. I've posted pics of it on my Flickr stream (it was an unseasonably gloomy day in June).