Nottingham Castle Museum and Art Gallery, Three Stones in the City of Ladies curated by Elisa Kay

Elisa Kay worked at Nottingham Castle for nine months from September 2010. She contributed to the development of new programming and particularly on the re-installation of the permanent collection exhibition spaces. She went on to develop an exhibition 'Three Stones' for the public programme for January 2011.

Three Stones in the City of Ladies* is a group exhibition about repetition and looking back, including work by Marion Adnams, Annette Kelm, Lee Miller, Eileen Quinlan and Lucy Skaer. The works in the show are gathered around a painting from the Nottingham City Museums and Gallerie’s collection; a surrealist landscape called Three Stones by Marion Adnams (1898 – 1995). Adnams was born in Derby and lived most of her life in the city. Although she achieved some success in her lifetime, her work is not widely known and so this exhibition, which includes loans from Derby Museum and Art Gallery, hopes to contribute to a history of her work.

Three Stones has inspired the exhibition's other theme, of repetition in representations by women artists: replicating or doubling, mirroring and masking. The works sit at a point where the repetition of an image takes a turn towards abstraction or pattern-making.

You will also be able to see a display of material from Drifting and Dreaming, the Spring/Summer 2011 collection from Stephen Jones Millinery inspired by Marion Adnams.

*The show’s title joins Adnams’ painting with Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), an extended allegory in defence of women in which de Pizan recounts the work and achievements of famous women through history. Each woman is a brick in the walls of the city, which she also inhabits.

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About the Curator

Elisa Kay is the Contemporary Art Society Centenary Fellow at Nottingham Castle & Art Gallery.

Elisa is also Curator at Flat Time House, the former home and studio of the late British artist John Latham. During her time working at the house she has established a pioneering programme that has included Latham’s contemporaries and collaborators as well as work by more recent generations of artists.

Recent projects have included a solo exhibition of John Latham's work at Lisson Gallery, The Lisson Gallery does not exist for 100 years, and a new commission and exhibition by Laure Prouvost. Forthcoming exhibitions at Flat Time House include solo shows by Bea McMahon and Carlyle Reedy.

Centenary Curatorial Fellowships: Towards establishing new strategies for curating and working with public collections. Working in partnership with our member museums to draw additional curatorial skills in to their teams is a new working model for the Contemporary Art Society.