Nina Thomas: Place Setting

7 Apr-19 May 2024

PV 6 Apr 2024, 2-4pm

Overview

LUX is pleased to present the first solo exhibition by London-based artist Nina Thomas presented in collaboration with Animate Projects and the British Ceramics Biennial in Stoke on Trent. 

The exhibition title, ‘Place Setting’, alludes to a set of tableware for dining, and also resonates with how lives are shaped by a particular culture, industry and workers. Nina Thomas’s film of the same name explores themes of loss, local history and memory, community, and deaf experience, particularly within the context of Stoke-on-Trent and the ceramics industry. The film layers photography, archival imagery, Spode ceramic patterns, text and captions, with sound by Chu-Li Shewring and text by Nina. The creative descriptive sound captions are a collaboration between Nina and CareFuffle Working Group. Nina approached sound creatively, working with Chu-Li and CareFuffle Working Group to think about what sound and silence might mean from a deaf perspective.

As part of her research Nina interviewed Malcolm Johnson and Anne Cartridge who had been pupils at The Mount School for the Deaf in Stoke-on-Trent in the 1960s/1970s, and who went on to spend their working lives in the Potteries. The interviews provide both a context for and documentation of significant local history, feeding into Nina’s interest in what it means to lose deaf clubs and other community spaces which once held rich cultural, linguistic and social value.

‘Place Setting’ was commissioned by Animate Projects and British Ceramics Biennial. The project has been supported by Deaflinks, The Willows School and Spode Museum Trust.

Supported using public funding from the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

About the Artist:

Nina Thomas grew up in Staffordshire, and now lives in London.

She works predominantly with film and installation, exploring overlooked or under-explored stories and histories. Recent work has focused on her experience of becoming deaf and subsequently seeking to understand other deaf experiences.

Nina is profoundly deaf, and as a founding member of The Film Bunch, a deaf and hard of hearing film organisation, she has curated the online screening Deaf Experience and was commissioned by Pan Macmillan to create an animation for poet Raymond Antrobus. Her film Silence was commissioned and exhibited by LUX, London in 2020. She has worked on access and advisory projects at the V&A, The Wallace Collection, National Disability Art Collection and Archive (NDACA), The British Museum, Shape Arts and the D4D research programme. Nina is a trustee at Stagetext.