Negotiating Heritage
Ragley Hall - 19th - 31st October 2013
An exciting group exhibition at Ragley Hall, Warwickshire exploring the topic of Heritage through an array of individual interpretations and creative outputs.Ragley Hall is the home of the 9th Marquess and Marchioness of Hertford and is a living and working stately home. But what place does a grand country house, built in 1680, have in 2013? Through this exhibition I wanted to consider the relationship between the exemplar architecture of the past, such as Ragley Hall, and amalgamate it with the designs of the future. Think visionary architecture alluding to social utopias and design perfection, combined with the antiques and ancestry that underpin our modern world. Ikea meets Chippendale?
Private View II - Review of Negotiating Heritage
by Julie Chamberlain
It has to be the most impressive Private View I’ve ever sipped a glass of wine at. But then I’ve never been to an art exhibition opening at a stately home before.
I drove through the large Capability Brown-designed parklands to park right in front of the very impressive portico of Ragley Hall. Inside, along with the other guests I enjoyed lovely nibbles, a glass of wine and a wander around some of the rooms of the Hall, which dates from 1680. The massive Great Hall, with baroque plasterwork by James Gibbs dating from 1750, has several other State Rooms leading off it, including one set for dinner for 24, a bedroom used by visiting royalty in the past and sitting rooms with old masters on the walls. From some of the windows the vistas stretch for miles across parkland, woods and a lake. The Hall is owned and lived in by the ninth Marquess and Marchioness of Hertford and their family, who were there for the opening of a new on-site attraction.
For the summer, Dawn Harris is the artist in residence at Ragley, On select days between now and October she will be based in the Ragley Gallery & Studio within the Grade 1 listed stables and will use it for reflection and research to produce work that responds to the Ragley environment. The residency is entitled Negotiating Heritage, and Dawn will be considering why heritage is important to the community.
To celebrate the opening of the new gallery and studios, there’s an exhibition on until May 19 entitled Curating Curiosity, featuring work by Dawn and 12 other artists who she selected to be in the exhibition. The impressively-large stable block – complete with atmospheric horse braying in the background – has been partly converted into the studios, but the brick floor and all fittings including metal feeders remain. In the different bays instead of horses there’s work by different artists on the walls. The artists range from the newly-graduated to the very established, with Coventry’s George Wagstaffe the best known. Dawn’s rationale for who she picked was simple: “I recently graduated from Worcester University and some of the artists were people who I knew from university and I know what their struggle is about and I knew them personally and their work, and what it’s like being an artist moving from education into the big wide world.
The exhibition is only on until May 19, so it’s a great opportunity for a day out to see an interesting collection of works in a lovely setting.
www.privateviewii.com