Archipelago
16 January – 10 February 2012
The latest exhibition presented by staff from Nottingham Trent University’s School of Art and Design featured experimental practice embracing a range of art and design disciplines.
Artists were asked to consider themselves and their practice as islands.
An island may be the work of one practitioner, that of an established collaboration, or a group brought together by common concerns.
Tizio Water, 2012
Floor installation incorporating rectangular glass holographic recording of the three-dimensional shadow of water, illuminated by a Tizio tabel lamp.
Tizio Water
This small rectangle of ‘ground’ inverts the normal impression of an archipelago – here the holographic shadow of liquid is the defining terrain, edged by the junction between the glass plate, on which the image is recorded and the surrounding solid architecture (the gallery floor).
Approached from a distance, the black, crane-like structure of a Tizio table lamp, a recognisable and practical design classic, offers a graphic and defined ‘point to view from’. It is, in a way, instructional: guiding the viewer to an observation point. Its light is precisely directed down onto a holographic rectangle which appears black and flat from a distance.
One aim of the installation is to interrogate the symbiosis between the historic ‘found’ object (recognised, celebrated and archived in major international art and design museums) and the ‘historic’ holographic recording (unknown, displaced and functionless).
The latter is made visible by the presence of the former.
Exhibition Reference
Date: 16 January – 10 February 2012
Title: Archipelago
Location: Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham, UK


