Curators' Walkthrough: Sarah Cunningham and Julia Isídrez

Nottingham Contemporary is running a curators' walkthrough on Wednesday 21 October, from 1pm to 2pm, to talk through the two Autumn exhibitions currently on. It's a guided tour led by the curators, so you'll get the inside track on the work rather than just wandering through on your own.

The walkthrough covers Julia Isídrez: Mud is everything and Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun, both of which opened on 9 October and run until 10 January. They're very different from one another. Isídrez is a clay sculptor from Paraguay, born in 1967, and her work is rooted in the ceramic traditions passed down through generations of women in Itá. She learned the craft from her mother, Juana Marta Rodas, working with local clay and long-standing Guaraní techniques. But while the methods are traditional, the subject matter is fantastical: hybrid, chimerical figures and multi-headed spherical amphibians drawn from popular traditions and folklore. This is her first international institutional solo show.

Cunningham, on the other hand, was a British artist (1993-2024) whose work returns to the city where she was born and raised. She looked for the essential and the alive through imaginary wildernesses and fluid forestscapes informed by science fiction, art history, ecology and personal references. This is her first institutional solo exhibition and the largest presentation of her work to date.

Because the walkthrough brings the two together, it's a good way to see how they sit side by side. The curators will be on hand to talk through both, so if you've seen one and not the other, or if you're coming to both for the first time, it's a chance to hear the thinking behind them. The session runs from 1pm to 2pm on Wednesday 21 October at Nottingham Contemporary.