- Venue
- Tattershall Castle
- Location
- East Midlands
Tattershall Castle is a National Trust property that has become a venue for six contemporary artists to present new works to the visiting public. First, a little context. Tattershall Castle is what remains of a castle: essentially a six-storey 15th Century brick tower surrounded by a moat and a garden in the Lincolnshire countryside. After the Civil War it fell into disrepair for about 200 years, before, to cut a long story short, it was rescued and restored in 1911. It opened to visitors in 1914 and has been in the stewardship of the Trust since 1925.
The pieces included in this show – House Of Bling – reflect on the building’s history and on some of the more romantic and mythic qualities that surround towers. Each work gets a space to itself, with the ground floor given over to support material that aims to inform the public of the inspiration behind, and the work that went into, the installation of the pieces. All very interesting and mercifully jargon free, it seems to have hit the right balance between education and enlightenment whilst not entirely giving the game away. House of Bling seems a provocative title for such a show, but as curators Jane Greenfield and Sue Crabtree remark in their short introduction, this was always a venue of opulence and grandeur.
In the Castle’s basement KMA (Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler), have placed a blank mannequin into a small dark anteroom, onto which is projected a figure who addresses us as the eponymous ‘Tour Guide’. He is, however, unreliable. Facts are mangled and the plot is lost now and again, moving from opinion to fact and back again. Visually, this digital/oral presentation is slick – the face turns to brick at times and there are costume changes – but at times glitchy (think Max Headroom, if you’re old enough). It creates a sort of interrupted fluency, cleverly echoing the sly and subversive text.
Catherine Bertola has two works on display – ‘Unseen By All But Me Alone’ and ‘The Visitors’ Book’. The former consists of exquisite golden cobwebs placed in high corners and on window frames. Each has been hand made in situ by the artist and hark back to the tradition of women spinning in these rooms. Their appearance – golden and authentic looking – wedge together ideas of value and neglect, activating the space effectively. ‘The Visitors’ Book’ consists of the 1914 visitors book placed open in a vitrine while a voice recites the names and addresses of those within it. It’s a measured memorial to those who came and saw the Castle when it was first opened and, trust me, more moving than it sounds.
The most intrusive piece of work – ‘Let Sleeping Dogs Lie…’ by Geraldine Pilgrim is probably the hardest to grasp. It’s made up of large packing cases in two spaces in the tower’s third floor. Inspired by photographs of the castle’s original fireplaces being returned in triumph prior to re-installation, Pilgrim populates these sculptural, half-open cases with the paraphernalia of myth. Furniture and mirrors evoke the lives of the towers occupants; long tresses of hair bring Rapunzel to mind. It’s a bold move by the artist, to marry myth and modernism (the cases look like post-Judd constructions, to these eyes). The cases are aesthetically brutal, dominating their contents and possibly overwhelming Pilgrim’s idea. Curatorially, it’s a bold move as the other works are decorative and/or discrete, which allows the general public to ignore or at least engage superficially if they choose.
Two pieces are situated outside the castle building, though one is really only visible from the battlements. Linda Florence has created a design, cut into the lawn that aprons the tower. It’s based on designs she found on discarded, but archived, tiles from the castle’s restoration. Much of this material has never been shown. From the top floor of the castle the design comes together, whereas at ground level it is, to all intents and purposes, invisible. That sense of theatrical reveal is its trump card. Although decorative and relevant, Florence’s ‘Reinstated Carpet’ is less symbolic or allusive than, say, Bertola’s pieces.
Also outside is Sarah Price’s ‘Reframing The Picturesque’. Consisting of several camera obscuras directed towards artificially created flower beds that evoke the history of neglect the Tattershall has at times endured. These magical images, at once remote and engaged, conjure up a time of Claude Glasses and early photography (the viewer needs to place a cloth over their head and the tripod-supported wooden boxes in order to see the images created).
As you can gather, it’s a varied show but centred around a couple of strong curatorial ideas. Each piece would succeed as a stand-alone work, but as a suite of artworks in a vibrant and novel space they come alive. Not exactly talking to one another, but revealing facets of a narrative that never really existed. Some of the work is documentary and some speculative, but that doesn’t seem to matter. We’re used to seeing art in public places, but to see one historical space, interesting in its own right, given over to entirely new works is rarer than one might think. Non-art spaces, when imaginatively and sensitively used by artists can provide, to paraphrase Duchamp, new thoughts for the building or perhaps uncovering some very old ones.
My one reservation would be to note a reliance on decoration and conventional concepts of beauty and good design to sweeten the pill of contemporary art. That’s a niggle though as, encouragingly, the whole project seems to have been a hit with the public, apparently doubling visitor numbers and allowing the Trust to extend the show beyond the original two-week slot.
