First UK institutional solo show and largest presentation of work by the late British artist Sarah Cunningham, a return to the city where she was born.
Sarah Cunningham's Midnight Sun is on at Nottingham Contemporary from 9 October 2026 to 10 January 2027. It's the first UK institutional solo show for the late British artist, who lived from 1993 to 2024, and the largest presentation of her work to date. It's also a homecoming: she was born and raised in Nottingham, so the work is returning to the city where she started.
Cunningham worked with imaginary wildernesses and fluid forestscapes, drawing on science fiction, art history, ecology and personal references. Her practice was nocturnal, and she described it as estranging her limbs and thoughts from systematic, painterly movements. She built up layers of paint with sweeping expressionistic gestures, shaping them into fluid motion and turning landscapes into scenes of possibility and portals into other worlds.
Two things in particular left their mark. In 2018, she did a residency at La Wayaka Current's Tropic 08N in the Panamanian jungle, living with the Kuna community. In 2019, she worked as a Gallery Assistant here at Nottingham Contemporary, where she encountered Daniel Steegmann Mangrané's The Word for World is Forest. Her influences ran from the science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and J.G. Ballard to the art of Ithell Colquhoun, Tacita Dean and Mangrané himself.
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Entry is free, with donations welcome, and the show runs through the winter until 10 January.
