The Laughing Umbrella: Nicola Green

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BP Portrait Award 2008

Nicola Green's portrait of Mark Pritchard has been selected for the 2008 BP Portrait Award showing now at the Aberdeen Art Gallery from 29 November 2008 to 24 January 2009 following excellent reviews and high attendance figures from its showing at Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery in London. After this point the exhibition will tour to Aberystwyth Arts Center from 4 February to 14 March 2009.

The East Wing Collection at The Courtauld

The portrait of the Late Joshua Compston is currently on view in the East Wing Collection at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Joshua Compston was at the Courtauld himself and set up the East Wing Collection, the first contemporary art exhibit at the Courtauld. The portrait is a tribute to him and his work.

There are on-going events and performances at the East Wing Collection. Details can be found on www.eastwing.co.uk .

Blind Art Exhibition - New York October 2006

Permanent Collection - Touring Exhibition

Nicola Green's No 1 Hit - The Laughing Record is part of The Blind Art Exhibition touring the U.S in 2006

Podcasts

* Click here to listen to Martha Kearney interviewing Nicola Green on Woman's Hour May 2003
* Click here to listen to Claudia Hammond interviewing Nicola Green on Emotional Rollercoaster March 2004

House Slave - Field Slave

Touring exhibition "House Slave - Field Slave" October 2007 Dulwich Picture Gallery - exhibition and workshops in the Sackler Centre for Arts Education

The Laughing Umbrella

Saturday, 10 April 2004

The Laughing Umbrella is a surreal, brightly coloured device. It creates a space where anyone can laugh, providing a safe, private, childlike place for people to lose self-consciousness. The Umbrella is part of Nicola Green's Laughing Project

Artist Nicola Green created this unique, portable environment so that she could record the unselfconcious laughter of people in any location. Nicola's tactics when recording laughter: she invites people to come under her umbrella, and asks them to laugh. People are surprisingly ready to laugh if you present them with a Laughing Umbrella.

"Laughter always has a rather difficult place in art. If something is funny, it is usually deemed silly, irrelevant or, at best, low art. Usually the only way someone working in fields associated with laughter can be taken seriously is to die by their own hand or to be French. In "The Name of the Rose", Umberto Eco explores this prejudice. The plot turns on an imaginary lost tome by Aristotle in praise of comedy. So irate does the existence of this treatise make the 14th-century Catholic church — which believes that all the works of God are perfect and to laugh at them is to consort with the devil — that a monk takes steps to ensure all who encounter the book die horribly. But if laughter is opening a wound, does it not deserve the attention that heartbreak receives from today’s tortured troubadours?" Steven Armstrong, Sunday Times

Copyright © 2003 Nicola Green

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