Nottingham Contemporary is to stage the first UK Retrospective of Sarah Cunningham, who tragically died in November 2024, struck by a Northern Line train after stepping onto the tracks at Chalk Farm station. She was 31.
Cunningham’s built imaginary forests and shifting wilderness scenes drew on science fiction, art history, ecology, and a deeply personal set of references, producing work that was representative of landscape rather than representational of any specific place. Her influences strand of speculative feminist thinking, running from Ursula K. Le Guin and J. G. Ballard through to the occultist painter Ithell Colquhoun, filmmaker Tacita Dean, and the Spanish artist Daniel Steegmann Mangrané.
Cunningham worked as a gallery assistant at Nottingham Contemporary in 2019. During that time, she was surrounded daily by Steegmann Mangrané’s exhibition The Word for World is Forest, a title itself borrowed from Le Guin’s novel. The combination of the show and the book seems to have crystallised something in her thinking. However, the real shift in her practice had actually begun a year earlier, during a research residency with La Wayaka Current in Panama, where she lived and worked alongside the Kuna community in the jungle. That experience appears to have reshaped her understanding of the relationships among living things, drawing her toward Indigenous ecological knowledge that resists the nature-versus-culture binary so deeply embedded in Western thought.
She returned to Nottingham during the pandemic in 2020, settling near Wollaton Park, where she began painting outdoors in what she came to think of as a forest studio, working among actual trees and undergrowth while completing her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art. The open, wild spaces around her fed directly into the world-building quality of her canvases from that point forward. She also developed an unusual nocturnal working method, painting through the night in a way that seemed to loosen her from more conventional, deliberate brushwork, producing pieces that dwell in darkness before resolving, almost inevitably, into something closer to dawn light.
The exhibition, titled Midnight Sun, is structured around exactly that interplay of night and day, pace and stillness. It opens with The World It Softly Lulls, a dark, mythical forest scene still caught mid-formation, and moves through Via Lucis. This title translates roughly as “way of light” and marks the transition out of darkness. It closes with Starshine and Clay, a vivid, almost eruptive canvas that curators describe as a dawn chorus charged with Cunningham’s own energy. It is, by some distance, the largest presentation of her work assembled to date, bringing together earlier paintings alongside previously unseen material pulled directly from her studio. Rather than presenting the work as fixed or finished, the show aims to open up what curators call the portals at the painting’s edge, letting colour and movement spill outward into something closer to an immersive environment than a conventional hang.
Cunningham was born in Nottingham in 1993 and completed her MA at the Royal College of Art in 2022. Her career, though brief, moved quickly. She held solo shows at Lisson Gallery in both Los Angeles and London, Flight Paths in 2024 and The Crystal Forest in 2023, along with In Its Daybreak, Rising at Almine Rech in New York in 2022. Her work also appeared in group exhibitions across Aspen, Berlin, Seoul and Vancouver, and she received both the Ali H. Alkazzi Scholarship and the Djanogly Art Award in 2019, in addition to her earlier residency in Panama.
Midnight Sun is curated by Katie Simpson, Niall Ó Faircheallaigh and Klara Szafrańska, and has been made possible through support from Lisson Gallery and the Nixon Collection. A companion publication, the first dedicated to Cunningham’s work, will accompany the show, featuring contributions from Simpson alongside critic Hettie Judah, writer John Newling and Ó Faircheallaigh.
Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun opens at Nottingham Contemporary on October 9, with a private view the evening before, and runs through January 10, 2027, offering audiences in the city where she grew up a first real chance to spend time inside the strange, half-lit worlds she built during her short career.
Sarah Cunningham: Midnight Sun at Nottingham Contemporary
Fri October 9 2026 – Sun January 10 2027
Private View: Thu October 8