A couple of friends of mine from way back when I did the Visual Dialogues project, Stripped, are involved in the Illuminate group. Here in Nottingham, it's currently the World Event Young Artists movement, which is basically a whole loaf of Arts projects going on for 10 days, including music, dance, art, gastronomy and many more. This year has a lot of Chinese influence in the events, involving a lot of Chinese students that study at Nottingham Trent, and also included the Living in Silk at the Nottingham Castle which opened a couple of months ago.
Having got word of it from Georgia, a friend from Stripped, and Amanda, a friend back from school who now does Fashion at Nottingham Trent, Katie and I popped along to the 'Beauty from Different Directions' event, a performance programme showcasing work by Illuminate inspired by the Living in Silk collection. The piece were absolutely stunning, and totally not what I was expecting; I wasn't entirely sure what the event was about in all honesty, so it was a completely breath-taking surprise.
On arrival, Katie and I were seduced over to the Pavillion by the sound of the Chinese zheng, and what might we find there but a gorgeous performance to it in a beautiful creation. And so we were hooked, and joined the procession up towards the main gallery.
After a captivating performance by both musician and dancer, we were lead by a pair of Indian drummers to lead us up to the next piece.
After a promenade up the stairs (lots of nostalgia going on), we arrived in the Long Gallery where a pair of actors were making a hilarious show of their characters in these beautiful pieces. I absolutely adore the photography along the walls of the staircase. It turns out this was a different project called Styling Project 2, involving students from various MA Fashion courses at Nottingham Trent.
They really did a fabulous job, and I just had to blog about it today. The textures are just fantastic, and really just perfect that the theme is around the Chinese Silk collection on at the moment. Turns out they're from Hangzhou! If you are in Nottingham, I urge you to take a look at the events going on this week, I'm planning to get round to as many as possible. Check out
http://worldeventyoungartists.com/ for details! For more work by Illuminate check out their
Facebook and
blog! There's a couple of more detailed photos, and also on how the pieces were made. Well done to everybody involved, Katie and I had a fantastic time, I can't wait to check out all the other events this week.
