- Venue
- Meadow Arts
- Location
- West Midlands
I met up with Anne de Charmant at the entrance to the large walled garden at Attingham Park. Anne is the director of Meadow Arts a non-physical gallery based in Ludlow, they describe themselves as a peripatetic organisation, acting as a sort of roaming curator using National Trust sites, working toward building new audiences for contemporary art. This project is set in amongst the beautiful and open landscape of Attingham Park. The start of my Grand Tour was a piece by Cornford & Cross; ‘The Once and Future King’ is a ball shaped sculpture made up of a heart of razor wire surrounded by the latest invention in metal security tape. The sculpture hovers over the original well, the life source for the once abundant agricultural garden. It lies next to a recreational plunge pool and mirrors a fresh re-instated crop of vegetables and herbs planted by head warden and a host of volunteers. The sculpture alludes to the value and power of water, the security of protecting that power and the barriers to which we are willing to put up to safe guard our food interests. Water, the world over is the driving factor in human existence. In other parts of the Earth this is more apparent, but perhaps, here in the safety of the developed world, maybe one day, not to far away, we will have to return to this fortification of food storage and production. And if this all sounds too cataclysmic, too Mad Max then the sculpture can be enjoyed as much as the ornate seeding of the vegetable garden that it protects.
Anne led me on and we met up with Ivan and Heather Morison. Ivan had just completed the first rung of what is to become an adobe rookery, that is a large 40 ft mud and hay birdhouse, based on Egyptian rookeries which farm the guano for fertiliser. The piece has an instructional title ‘How to Survive in the Coming Bad Years,’ and yes I know what your thinking more doom and gloom. And yet this piece will inspire the most eco-skeptical among us. The suggestion is that these type of symbiotic relationships, between man and bird – shelter for fertiliser will become more and more important if we are to adapt and face new challenges in a changing world. The rookery is more than a metaphor, for one it will be functional, offering accommodation to the local feathered populous, but the work also references the ancient oak woodland at the core of the Attingham Park estate.
It would be nice to see if any guano can be harvested and perhaps used in the volunteers veg patch.
We marched on a whistle stop circle of the estate, we passed Susan Grants Monopoly-like house pool; Dispossession, which is a 2007 piece commissioned for Flow, Kielder Water, by Art Circuit. We saw Charlotte Gyllenhammar’s piece; Traum and Christina Mackie’s, The Large Huts, both works were presented at the New Art Centre, Roche Court in 2007.
Anne and I talked about the nature and history of National Trust sites, it is to be applauded that the National Trust are keen to reach out to new audiences through contemporary art as it is equally important for artists to recognise and engage with the frequent users, the dog walkers, the twitchers, local historians and the stately home visitors.
The last two pieces are by Keith Wilson, Roma, 2008. Keith Wilson’s work is a formal gesture and walk-through sculpture, which borrows the shape of a cattle run. The interior walls of the walkway are coated in a thick layer of high-density rubberised foam, finished in a luxuriant glossy blue, seemingly at odds with the harsh industrial materials used to construct the run. The sense of containment one experiences while walking through the sculpture is both comforting and disorientating. The work is named Roma since its curves echo those of the river Tiber, Italy’s third longest river, and that on which Rome was founded; perhaps a reference to the rise and rapid fall of a once great empire or to the ruinous Grand Tour of the 2nd Lord Berwick who commissioned the remodeling of At Ingham by Humphry Repton.
And finally we finished of by viewing a piece which was under wraps; Henry Krokatsis’, The Double Hut, which will have the appearance of a disheveled common variety garden hut, but make use of a concealed ice-house to create an allusion of mystery and drama.
Hopefully following this wet August, September and October may allow us rest bite and invite us out into the un-wilderness that is the landscaped National Trust sites.
And if you can come to Attingham Park for the sculpture and surroundings. ‘Give Me Shelter’ opens at the end of September and is in-situ for one year.
www.nationaltrust.org.uk. www.meadowgallery.co.uk
