Walkthrough of Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun with Dr. Adam Searle

Dr Adam Searle leads a walkthrough of Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun at Nottingham Contemporary on Wednesday 18 November, from 1pm to 2pm. The session runs alongside the exhibition, which is the first institutional solo show and largest presentation to date by the late British artist Sarah Cunningham (1993-2024). It's a homecoming for her work, shown in the city where she was born and raised.

Searle is an Assistant Professor in Human Geography at the University of Nottingham and a 2026 UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship recipient. He'll be talking about how feminist speculative fiction shaped Cunningham's ideas of 'nature' and 'the human', drawing on writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and the method of 'fabulation' inherited from Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. He'll be reading closely from Le Guin's The Word for World is Forest (1972) and The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1997).

Cunningham's practice was nocturnal and expressionistic, and she worked in a way that estranged her limbs and thoughts from systematic painterly movements. The result was work that dwells in darkness only to culminate in the dawn chorus. The walkthrough is a chance to hear how those ideas connect to the writing she kept close.

The session runs from 1pm to 2pm in Galleries 2 and 3, and you'll meet at Reception. It's free to attend.