Feature: Exhibition - Nina Mankin’s Where I Once Played runs from September 10-18
Published: 8 September, 2011
by DAN CARRIER
IT was working Saturdays in her father’s textile shop that was the genesis of an art show starting this week in Primrose Hill, says artist Nina Mankin.
Nina, whose father Ian ran a textile shop for 27 years in Regent’s Park Road, has used the shopping street as a giant canvas for her works.
Placing 14 pieces in 14 different shops, she has created a trail, one that is a bit of a treasure hunt, she says – giving you the chance to discover lost loves and hidden messages, a trail that includes filling in questionnaires and finding keys that will take you to a musical performance at a secret location.
“My dad used to run a shop here when I was younger,” says the artist, who graduated from the Hereford College of Art and Design in 2002.
“I worked there for a long time and it means I have a great sense of nostalgia for the area.”
She attended Haverstock and Camden School For Girls before university – and then saw her childhood world disappear when her father sold up. It was this that has prompted the works, one of which sits in his old shop.
“For about a year I couldn’t bear to come back here – I was filled with a sense that it held too many memories,” she admits. But this has inspired her pieces.
Her father’s former store is now run by the high street shopping guru Mary Portas, currently employed by the government to investigate what has gone wrong in the world of the traditional British shopkeeper, as an upmarket charity shop raising funds for Save The Children.
“I plucked up the courage to come back eventually and was very pleased to see what our old shop was now being used for,” she admits.
• Nina Mankin’s Where I Once Played runs from September 10-18 in 14 Primrose Hill shops.
For more information and to download a map go to Events/Arts Trail at www.lotusartsbox.com/ or go to Mary’s
Living and Giving
shop, 109 Regent’s Park Road, NW1, 020 7586 9966.