A New Flier

After all our hard work on the Christina Mackie project, this was the finished result - our new Illuminate leaflet! Working with local designer Tom, we have created a leaflet that, while focusing mainly on the exhibition, also helps to give a good sense of what illuminate is like, and what we are focused on as a group. 

Sculpture Session

The culmination of our working with Christina Mackie was a sculpture session at local artist's studio One Thoresbuy Street. Here we we worked with Nottingham artist Alex Pain to create sculptures out of found objects. Below are a small selection of some of the final pieces - others will be added soon!

Wollaton Hall

Another thing that we did in order to try and help us understand the work of Christina Mackie was to go an visit the Geology and Natural History archives of Wollaton Hall, located in Nottingham, for a behind the scenes tour. We saw lots of really interesting things which really helped to inspire us, but most of all helped to understand why Christina Mackie finds this such a fascinating subject!

More photos to be added soon!

Cave Tour

To help us try to understand Christine Mackie and her work better, we did various that she did to try and help to inspire us. The first was going on a cave tour through the caves under Nottingham Castle. We were looking at the crumbling nature of the sandstone and how other stones were stuck through the layers, the way shadows are cast on to the rock and - the most fun - trying to find faces! This is a small selection of some of the photographs taken by illuminate members and will be frequently updated.

Christina Mackie

Alongside our current Jewellery Project, Illuminate have also been busy making their own contributions towards the Christina Mackie instillation which was recently housed at Nottingham Castle. Mackie is an artist who is hugely inspired by Nature and natural substances and forms such as stones, rocks and minerals. For her most recent work, Judges III, Mackie looked to Australia for inspiration but it is explained: 

'"They might have their origins in a North Australian storm, but the strangely atmospheric photographs of volcanic rock formations that are at the core of Christina Mackie's The Judges III, belong very much to their new home in Nottingham. "What's going on in this work is kind of situated in Australia, with the sand, the rock, the glazes and imagery," she explains, "but it's not really about Australia in any way. It's very closely connected to this location, the Castle Museum on its sandstone cliff, with the cave networks underneath, its collections of studio ceramics and roof tiles, even the way the piece sits in the Long Gallery space here." ' - an

A few members of illuminate also went along to meet Christina Mackie at her exhibition. More information on what was talked about will be uploaded soon! 

Images and text taken from http://new.a-n.co.uk