What better way to display outdoor sculpture for sale than to place it in a
beautiful garden? It’s infinitely preferable to the sterile surroundings of
an art gallery. Outdoor galleries such as the Hannah Peschar Sculpture
Garden, in Surrey, or the Henry Moore Foundation, at Perry Green,
Hertford-shire, are long-established permanent sites, but there is a growing
trend for using private gardens to host temporary exhibitions over the
summer months. When placed in a garden, sculptures are enhanced by and
contribute to their surroundings, providing focal points and another layer
of interest: ideas that could be adapted for one’s own garden.
Rosie Pearson, 48, is the half-sister of Viscount Cowdray and a scion of the
Pearson family, which has a £570m stake in the publishing empire that bears
the family name. A former journalist, she bought Asthall Manor, in
Oxfordshire, in 1997, after returning from 10 years in Jamaica, and has been
running the On Form biennial show since 2002.
Asthall was the childhood home of the Mitford sisters (Nancy, Pamela, Jessica,
Diana, Unity and Deborah) from 1919 to 1926, and was a model for Alconleigh,
which features in Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.
The Hons’ Cupboard, headquarters of the Radlett secret society, is still
there. It was in this airing cupboard - the only warm room in the house -
that the young girls would gather to discuss the great matters of life.
The idea for On Form came after Pearson commissioned the sculptor Anthony
Turner, a schoolfriend, to carve some gate-pier finials in 2000. Asthall has
an architectural pedigree stretching back to the early 17th century, but
traditional ornamentation for the gateposts of historic houses - pineapples,
majestic lions or eagles - was far from her mind. “I wanted something with
character, mysterious but friendly, to welcome visitors with a promise of
the unexpected.” Local opposition to the swirling, sensuous organic shapes
in Guiting stone that now adorn the gateposts was at first pronounced.
“There were complaints to the council, and the local radio station came to
investigate, but within weeks indignation was transformed into delight,”
Pearson recalls. “Neighbours brought their friends to look at the new
sculptures and a honeymoon couple who had passed my gates wrote to tell me
the forms had lifted their hearts.”
The result of all this is that Pearson found herself taking on “a sort of
mission” to convert people to the beauty of contemporary sculpture in stone,
and to launch On Form. “I had no aspirations to start a business here. My
intention was to write a novel.”
At first, the main attraction for visitors was to look at the house (the
Mitford associations being a particular lure) and the garden, designed by
Isabel and Julian Bannerman in dreamy, romantic English country-house style.
The honey-coloured Cotswold stone is festooned with roses and the herbaceous
borders overflow with euphorbias, pelargoniums, lavenders, delphini-ums,
peonies and irises.
The sculptures, however, are increasingly becoming the main attraction. This
year, 18 artists will display 50 pieces, ranging in price from £400 to
£150,000, in the various environments of the manor: a mill race, diverted
centuries ago from the nearby River Windrush, which runs through the garden,
providing waterside sites bordered by a wild-flower meadow; a thatched
summerhouse by the Bannermans; long rides between yew hedges; a cloistered
walkway; and, at the edge of the garden, an elevated earthwork, a prime site
commanding fine views of the Windrush valley.
Among the exhibits will be an iconic pierced disc of chalcedony (a decorative
mineral stone) by Emily Young, Bridget McCrum’s elegant abstracted animal
forms and Paul Vanstone’s sophisticated stonerenditionsof Greek-inspired
drapery. Anthony Turner and Dominic Welch, who were instrumental in the
original launching of On Form, are also represented.
Nurturing the sculptors and their careers is an important part of Pearson’s
motivation. She charges only a small commission on works and keeps expenses
tightly reined in – the artists themselves man the show, so you can learn
from the horse’s mouth what the works are about.
Woodruffs Farm, in Sussex, where Elspeth Moncrieff has put on a summer
sculpture show for the past couple of years, has a much smaller garden than
Asthall, but a delightful one none-theless. Moncrieff and her husband,
Charles Bray, bought the house and its derelict 18th-century outbuildings
from the Petworth estate in 2000 and have sensitively restored the barn and
converted it into a gallery, where Moncrieff, another former journalist (for
The Art Newspaper), holds several exhibitions each summer.
Last year, she started showing sculpture outside. “Despite the logistics and
the fact that the costs of transporting and siting the pieces are
significant, it has been both successful and rewarding,” she says.
At the back of the pretty red-brick farmhouse, under an old apple tree, Leonie
Gibbs’s hauntingly beautiful bronze Pictish Queen steps forward as if to
meet her destiny, while John Taylor’s voluptuous naked torsos, in Carrara
marble, bring the mood of a Roman villa to their modern poolside setting.
At Lordswood, in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, David Messum, an established London
art dealer, has shown sculpture in his garden for the past three years. The
house has long had artistic links - it was commissioned by Mary Sargent
Florence, a late-19th-century artist, and became a haunt of the Bloomsbury
Group after her daughter Alix, who translated Sigmund Freud’s work into
English, married Lytton Strachey’s brother James, a psychoanalyst, in 1920.
The garden at Lordswood shows how sculpture can be used in a variety of
settings. Formal areas, with topiary and low box hedging form geometric
arrangements, offset by gravel or terracing. These contrast with softer
woodland and a water-lily-clad pond, banked with iris and gunnera.
Although an old art-world hand, Messum has been surprised at how
time-consuming the process of producing and showing sculpture can be. “If
someone commissions a piece from a sculptor in, say, Kilkenny limestone,
they may have to wait for a year or so until the quarry finds an appropriate
piece of stone,” he says. “The carving itself is slow, hard manual labour,
and putting a piece in place may involve special machinery such as a gantry
and complicated access considerations.” The exhibits this summer include the
haunting bronze figures of Laurence Edwards and abstract stone symbols by
Andrea Schulewitz.
North of the border, in Perthshire, Helen Denerley’s characterful scrap-metal
sculptures of animals - one of them, Ariel, is made from an old motor-bike
of the same name - is currently colonising the gardens of Gleneagles House.
Nestling at the foot of the Ochils, the predominantly 18th-century house has
an informal garden that looks out onto the hills and is approached via a
200-year-old avenue of limes planted by Admiral Duncan, an ancestor of the
resident Haldane family, to commemorate his victory at the battle of
Camperdown in 1797. Its features include a bank of lupins, an orchard,
swathes of crocosmia, borders of peonies, astrantia, Alchemilla mollis
and euphorbia, a stream and a pond flanked with flag irises and red-hot
pokers - a colourful backdrop for the wildlife and domestic creatures that
make up Denerley’s repertoire (prices of which start at £250).
Even if you don’t buy, what these exhibitions demonstrate is that sculpture,
carefully placed, heightens the effect of a garden. At its best, it
delineates the landscape, highlights its features and helps to transport the
mind beyond the everyday. An art in itself.
On Form, at Asthall Manor, near Burford, Oxfordshire, runs until July 6
(01993 824319, www.onformsculpture.co.uk
) The exhibition at Moncrieff-Bray Gallery, at Woodruffs Farm,
Egdean, near Petworth, West Sussex, is open Fri, Sat and Mon (other days by
appointment) until June 21 (07867 978414, www.moncrieff-bray.com
) The open sculpture weekend at Messum’s, Lordswood, Marlow,
Buckinghamshire, runs from June 20 to 22 (01628 486565) Helen
Denerley’s sculptures are at Gleneagles House, Auchterarder, Perthshire,
until June 16 (01764 682388)
Top of the form: What to look for when buying a sculpture
If the piece is heavy, it may have to be professionally moved and transported.
Discuss with the dealer what additional costs are involved.
It is wise to have in mind a place for the sculpture you are purchasing: it
might look wonderful in the setting in which you have viewed it, but is it
right for your garden?
You won’t want to be shifting a heavy piece too many times when you get it
home, so plan the siting in advance.
Some sculptures will need a solid base to sit on, particularly if they are
heavy. They may also require a plinth to raise them up for best effect.
You may need to consider security. Bronze sculptures are particularly
vulnerable to theft because they are valuable for the metal content. The
dealer should be able to advise you on securing the piece in the garden and
even on the installation of an alarm or webcam if the work is extremely
valuable. Make sure it is well insured, too.
Ask your dealer how the sculptural material will weather outside - the colour
may alter with the elements and with time.
Depending on the material, there may be maintenance and care instructions that
will best maintain the condition and appearance of the sculpture.
