Walkthrough of Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun with Dr. Adam Searle
This autumn we are presenting Midnight Sun - the first institutional solo exhibition, and largest presentation of works to date, of the late British artist Sarah Cunningham (1993–2024, UK). Join Dr. Adam Searle for a walkthrough of the exhibition, exploring the influence of feminist speculative fiction on Sarah Cunningham's conceptual treatment of 'nature' and its relation to 'the human’.
Our worlds are becoming increasingly weirder, they are disorientating; and some worlds, of course, are weirder than others. An inspiration for Sarah Cunningham alongside numerous feminist philosophers, anthropologists, and cultural theorists writing on the lived experience of ecological change and its implications for the relation of nature and culture (including but not limited to influential scholars like Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing and Vinciane Despret) has been writer Ursula K. Le Guin's contributions to science fiction and literary criticism. The session will explore the method of 'fabulation' (a concept inherited from French philosophers Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze) as a mode of critical storytelling for our contemporary experience of ecological violence.
Cunningham's practice has been shaped by her construction of a 'forest studio', and forests in Britain have never been so precarious. What remains of our ancient woodland or temperate rainforest is diminishing at a staggering rate, and the 2026 death of the Major Oak, one of Britain's most iconic trees in Nottinghamshire's own Sherwood forest, epitomises our current moment. Through this Walkthrough, Dr Adam Searle’s intention is to situate Sarah Cunningham's practice within a deeper and complex genealogy of 'storytelling otherwise' through thinking with forests, speculating on what forests might be, intensifying their experiential affordances, and decentring forests from purely human modes of analysis or value.
In addition to engaging Midnight Sun in this context, we will create the space for close readings of excerpts from Le Guin's sci-fi novel The Word for World is Forest (1972) and her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1997), both of which were sources of inspiration for Cunningham. Together, we will follow a series of creative writing prompts to explore how 'fabulation' as a collective practice can help us think about different relationships with ecology through visual art.
Dr. Adam Searle is Assistant Professor in Human Geography at the University of Nottingham. His research spans cultural and historical geography and examines the relations between ecology and technology, and how emergent technologies affect cultural ideas about "nature." In 2021 he cofounded the international interdisciplinary Digital Ecologies research group and is an editor of Digital Ecologies: Mediating More-than-human Worlds (2024) and On the Metabolic Governance of Life (2027). In 2026, he was awarded a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship for Promethean Publics - a curatorial-research project that asks what it means to 'move fast, break things' in an already-broken world. The project critically examines the anti-democratic politics underpinning Big Tech's approach to socio-ecological crises and aims to explore and cultivate alternative, just, and democratic futures. As part of his work, Adam works extensively with visual media, film, and public institutions (including the Natural History Museum and Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew).
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This event will be held in Galleries 2&3. Meet at Reception.
Speakers will use microphones.
This event is wheelchair accessible.
If you have any questions around access or have specific access requirements we can accommodate, please get in touch with us by emailing info@nottinghamcontemporary.org or phoning 0115 948 9750.