Nottingham Lace Places
3D Virtual Exhibition Tour

Newstead Abbey
Newstead Village, NG15 8NA

Lace has long been a feature of our homes, our wardrobes and the significant moments of our lives. But until the 1760s, it was made entirely by hand using time-consuming craft processes. It was a beautiful but expensive luxury, affordable only by the few. Then, Nottingham inventors began to adapt framework knitting machines (originally used for making stockings) to create lace net. By the mid-19th century, Nottingham machines were making affordable, high quality, patterned lace to rival lace made by hand. Nottingham became the world centre of the machine-made lace trade.

This temporary exhibition, in a suite of rooms at Newstead Abbey, brings together objects from Nottingham City Museums’ internationally important lace collection, chosen to highlight less well-known lace stories from Nottingham and beyond. It also includes work by artists Joy Buttress & Manolis Papastavrou, Lesley Farrell and Teresa Whitfield.

In the accompanying exhibition 'Lace Legacy', Fine Art students from Nottingham College display work made in response to the lace collection and the gardens at Newstead Abbey. The Fine Art studio at Nottingham College is housed in the former lace lofts at the Adams Building in Nottingham's historic Lace Market, originally home to the checking and hand-finishing of machine-made lace before it was sold to national and international buyers in salesrooms on a lower floor. These same lofts have now prompted new creativity, using Nottingham’s lace history as a creative point of departure.

The 3D Virtual Exhibition Tours of 'Nottingham Lace Places' and 'Lace Legacy' include pop-up texts, high resolution images of lace details and links to related films, including interviews with some of the students.

The tours were commissioned by Nottingham City Museums for 'Global Lace', a programme of research, exhibitions and displays that begins to uncover local and global stories within the Museums’ Designated Lace and Lace Machinery collection. The project also includes the redisplay and family-friendly interpretation of the Lace Machinery Gallery at Nottingham Industrial Museum.

'Global Lace' is a partnership between Nottingham City Museums and the University of Nottingham, made possible thanks to public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

For further information on the exhibition or to please contact the Nottingham City Museums collections team: museum.collections@nottinghamcity.gov.uk.

Nottingham City Museums would like to thank: Dr David Gehring, Dr Josephine Tierney, Dr Helen Foster and the Department of History at the University of Nottingham; Nottingham College Fine Art Degree Programme, especially the students: Saz Abdalrahman, Lethicia Anglin, Rayan Benjamin, Lydia Blyth, Ellie Cunnington, John Hancock, Ella Heaton, Elle Innocent, Lizzie Flint, Jazz Freeman, Becky Leivers, Eleanor Oprych, Marita Robinson, Chris Tregenza, Delsha Tucker, Charlotte Walker, Kayleigh Wall and Yang Jiang.

Find out more: newsteadabbey.org.uk
From 30th July 2022 to 30th October 2022

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