Exhibition Archive

Tim Neath has carefully crafted a sprawling model world using recycled cardboard and craft materials. The scenes are populated with dated vintage action figurines, set for an epic encounter on a miniature scale. Immersing the viewer in the imagery of Hollywood film, the piece unpicks the politics of the science fiction and Western genres, in particular the idea of Manifest Destiny: the belief that colonial expansion by American settlers was the will of God.

Tim Neath is an artist based at 2 Queens in Leicester and was commissioned by Attenborough Arts Centre to support him in the completion of this long-term project.

In connection with our main exhibition ‘Mariner 9’, local meteorite collector Graham Ensor has curated a display of meteorites and related artefacts in Gallery 3. With specimens from Mars and the moon, as well as local samples from the famous fall near Barwell village, these meteorites have stories to tell about the origins of the universe, and their disruptive descents to earth.

When a 4.5 billion-year-old meteorite exploded over the Leicestershire village of Barwell on Christmas eve in 1965, nine-year-old Graham gained a life-long passion for the subject. He now owns about 1,000 specimens, which experts believe could be the largest private collection in the UK. Many of the meteorites in Graham’s collection are of great scientific value and he regularly works with the Open University to make material available for research. He has generously loaned a selection for display in the Attenborough Art Centre.

In order to prioritise the health and safety of our visitors and staff, this exhibition is open by appointment only. To enquire about booking a visit please contact us at: arts-centre@le.ac.uk

Created with software used by the film and gaming industries, and using data from NASA’s missions to Mars, Richardson has created a realistic representation of the Mars landscape covered by the debris of centuries of exploration. Despite the apparent abandoned state of the planet, some of the spacecraft continue to work, looking for signs of life.

Kelly Richardson (b. 1972, Canada) is one of the leading members of a new generation of artists using digital technologies to create hyper-real, highly charged landscapes. Recent solo exhibitions include Dundee Contemporary Arts, CAG Vancouver, VOID Derry and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. Her video installations have been included in presentations at the Toronto Film Festival and the Sundance Film Festival.

The group Reasonable Adjustment, or RAD, were formed in 1989 in protest at the treatment of disabled people, and were active during the late eighties and early nineties. What made RAD unique was the advocacy of armed resistance in the face of what they saw as unfair treatment of disabled people by the right-wing conservative government of Margaret Thatcher.

Between 1989 and 1994 they carried out a series of attacks including a shooting at the BBC and the bombing of Euston Station. Reasonable Adjustment modelled themselves on other historical armed resistance movements and are comparable to direct action groups such as the Animal Liberation Front, however, no one was seriously injured or killed in their campaign of violence.

At the time of Reasonable Adjustment, Justin Edgar was a student at Portsmouth Art College. He first noticed graffiti depicting RAD’s distinctive logo when taking photographs for an assignment on the city environment. He began to document the movement and this exhibition presents items from his personal collection of the last thirty years as well as borrowed items.

This was Williamson’s largest solo project to date, featuring a brand new project ‘inspiration archives’, which had been commissioned by Attenborough Arts. Inspiration Archives brought together never before seen objects, artefacts, ephemera, film footage and photography, which document the lives of several historically overlooked personalities. Characters included; Deaf wrestler Cain in Chains; Charlotte Waterton, granddaughter of zoological illustrator William Waterton, and paraplegic traveller and explorer ‘Parachute Susan’ O’Sullivan, alongside various other inspirational historic figures of differing professions and backgrounds.

Accompanying the Inspirational Archive installation, Attenborough Arts Centre and Aaron Williamson also curate a retrospective of pas solo and collaborative projects including film, performance, objects, text and photography.

Her landscape paintings evolve from hard earned studies made while in the landscape, placing a board on the ground to make either a drawing or watercolour.

In contract, her self-portrait works are critical examinations, and reaffirmations of self. Encompassing strength, humanity and wit, they are statements as much about the human conditions as her own.

Jones studied at Camberwell School of Art, followed by the Royal College of Art, where she won a Rome scholarship in 1982.

During his childhood, Golding’s family moved house regularly, not only to various contrasting communities in London, but also overseas to Ghana in West Africa. These experiences of continuous fluidity and movement have undoubtedly influenced Golding’s artwork. Golding premiered two new films alongside his 2016 film Chainmail which forms a loose portrait of his younger brother, Solomon, the first black British male dancer of The Royal Ballet.

The exhibition is not about the hierarchy of taste as it manifests between high and low culture, but rather about the cultural and political manifestation of pattern within craft, sculpture, painting, costume design, film and photography. Criminal ornamentation celebrates the impolite and apologetic display of patter, repetition and colour as freedom from the elitism of good taste, rejoicing the radical deviancy of pattern.

For this exhbition, delGado travelled to Greece, North Macedonia and Calais to film, photograph, and record the journeys taken by Syrian refugees. delGado has not filmed these ‘invisible’ people who proliferate our media, but the places they have passed through. There are traces of their existence, fragmented experiences, fleeting moments and marks left on the land as they pass through to find safety.

Using video, photography, lighting and sound, Altered Landscapes encourages you to open up contemplation and discussion about the current situation in Europe, a place that has become filled with militarised border control.

Steffie Ricahrds’ work aims to visualise this and relates to the transient values of coastal Cornwall. She explores the constant yet subtle changes to the environment, both brought and erased by the tides, and asked us to think about out relationship with the magnitude of the ocean itself.

Drawing together works by artists’ Tony Heaton, Noemi Lakmaier, Aaron Williamson, Bobby Baker, and photographer David Hevey, the collection explored various aspects of disability politics. Using sculpture, performance, film, and drawing to address a diverse range of concerns, they explore political activism, the labour market, medical treatment, access, sexuality, and hidden history; they challenge the social, economic and cultural forces that characterise disability.