Season's greetings and 2022 highlights

Digital Newsletter 19/12/22

The Sidney Nolan Trust wishes everyone a happy festive season and a creative year ahead.

2022 has been a successful and busy year for the Trust and we thought this was a good opportunity to briefly look back at the highlights of the past 12 months.

Our exhibition programme opened with The Peace of Wild Things by Daniel MacCarthy in our main Gallery following his 12-month residency with the Trust in 2021. In the Library of Rodd Court, we presented Nolan’s experiments with polaroid photography drawing from our rich and varied photographic archive, which extends to over 30,000 images of Nolan’s life and work. We also opened the season with new sculpture by Jim Carter, who created Of Black Shires. These significant animal works and soundscape adopt a liminal space and were made using organic material collected during visits to The Rodd and the nearby landscape. These works will travel full cycle this week when they are ritually burnt around the time of the Winter Solstice.

Images: Country Exhibition ©Adam Stevens, Of Black Shires - ©Jim Carter, Drawing in Rodd Wood ©Fiona McIntyre

In May Fiona McIntyre presented a new body of work, Dreaming the Land, in the Library of Rodd Court. This followed a series of mini-residencies at The Rodd where Fiona spent the short winter days drawing at the river or in Rodd Woods, as well as within Rodd Court using the landscape and Nolan’s archive as inspiration.

In the Gallery, we showed Nolan’s Celtic Image series of works, displayed in the UK for the first time. These large spray paintings were created in 1987 shortly after Nolan’s final visit to his ancestral home in the Burren. They highlight Nolan’s lifelong fascination with ancient civilisations and cultures and reveal his return to abstraction during the last 10 years of his life at The Rodd.

We closed our season with the touring Mappa Marches exhibition featuring the work of 6 artists, 2 poets and an aerial filmmaker to celebrate the solace and magic of our Marches landscape, history and culture.

Alongside our exhibition programme, we have held several events and workshops for all ages including a really popular series of art workshops for children and our second successful Community Day in July.

Over the main summer period, we were delighted to welcome Kate Constantine and her family for a month-long residency to coincide with a major exhibition of aboriginal painting in our main Gallery, Country in partnership with Aboriginal Art UK. The exhibition featured work by over 20 indigenous Australian artists, many of whom have been significant in developing contemporary Aboriginal visual culture.

Images: 2022 Community Day ©Jony Easterby

In 2022 we awarded two 12-month residencies to Faith Limbrick and Jony Easterby and our whole team have enjoyed working alongside them. Faith was awarded a large DYCP grant from Arts Council England which has supported her to develop a range of new works and develop lasting relationships with artists and curators. Jony has experimented with plants, form and growth working independently as well as bringing together artist camps over the summer. This has included creating CHIT, 324 baking potatoes strung from a wooden frame, as an exploration into plant growth and the sprouting of seeds in search of light. It has been popular with visitors to The Rodd and continues to transform within the kitchen of Rodd Court.

Our learning programme has continued to develop, and we were pleased to receive further funding for Cultivate our youth programme and launch our new programme, MAKE for 10–14-year-olds. These sessions have enabled young people to explore contemporary arts and culture by meeting and working with professional artists, curators and creative producers. We’ve also developed new relationships with HCA Foundation and Hereford Sixth Form College.

Images: MAKE and Cultivate learning programmes ©Sidney Nolan Trust

It just remains for us to say a huge thank you to all the artists, creative practitioners and partners we have had the pleasure of working with over the last year as well as our communities and audiences. We look forward to working with you again in the future and welcoming you back to The Rodd.

Please do stay in touch and keep an eye on our 2023 programme when it’s announced in the New Year.

Best Wishes
Sidney Nolan Trust