Stourhead Series

The Stourhead Series came about through a residency commissioned jointly by The National Trust and The Hotbath Gallery, Bath, supported by Arts Council England.
The residency formed part of the exhibition Beauty and the Beast  that took place at Stourhead House and Gardens (NT) August – September 2006. (catalogue ISBN 978 –1 –84359 –267 – 9)

Beauty and the Beast was an exhibition of contemporary sculpture, sited around the historic 18th Century landscape gardens at Stourhead that looked at the relationship between The Classical and The Contemporary and included the work of eak-art, Barbara Ash, Fiona Crisp, Dame Elisabeth Frink, Jeremy Turner, Abigail Fallis, Gary Martin, Boo Ritson, Deborah Jones, David Toop, Beth Carter, Kieran Brown, Gavin Turk and Keir Smith.

The following text was written by Fiona Crisp at the end of the six week residency in September 2006:

It’s beauty raising it’s ugly head again …..

When commissioned as artist-in-residence for the Beauty and the Beast exhibition at Stourhead, a phrase, I believe spoken originally by an art critic, resurfaced from the depths of my memory. Now, nearing the completion of my time working here, the same phrase persists ……

It’s beauty raising it’s ugly head again

For me, Beauty is the Beast.  By stating this, I do not intend to blacken Beauty’s name or to advocate that it should be denied or ejected.  I say it instead to remind myself that Beauty, far from being benign, is something to be grappled or sparred with – in other words, given the fighting respect it deserves.

Beauty, along with Virtue (and, interestingly, also Vice) is almost always personified as female.  Beauty distracts, beguiles, soothes or comforts.  In myth and legend Beauty is used to give meaning and direction to a quest but it is also used to deceive and distract – to ‘get one past’ the hero.  Imagine, for example, how much shorter Homer’s Odyssey would have been had Odysseus been blind to Beauty.

In the gardens at Stourhead, there is a sensual beauty of smell and sound, of climate and touch but overwhelmingly, Stourhead’s beauty is visual.  The literally spectacular nature of the gardens only exists through an exacting visual control, achieved through horticultural means.  As one walks around the gardens, one’s view is therefore prescribed and only at certain points are we allowed a vista. In between these ‘opening ups’ we are kept looking inwards - literally at what is near to us on the path and metaphorically at our inward thoughts.

These relationships between proximity and distance, between dark and light are crucial to how the gardens function.  By limiting our opportunities to perceive a view, each vista appears to us as fresh and enlivened, as though we were actually being offered up a painting.  The impact of such a gesture is predicated on the intervening periods of interiority – we thus need to limit our vision in order to be able to see.

Perhaps this is why, for me, Ariadne is a pivotal figure in the gardens.  She lies in the underworld of the Grotto in perpetual reverie, enduring but far from inert – as we are reminded by the continual flow of spring water that, like a river, is always new, always the same.  Unlike her fellow statues with their ‘blind’ stares, Ariadne closes her eyes to the spectacular beauty of the gardens, having recourse only to the mind’s eye and subconscious spectres. 

My time at Stourhead has been intense.  Emotional and intellectual decisions, usually drawn out over an extended period of a residency, have by necessity been kaleidoscoped into a short six-week period.  In this time I have truly been beguiled by the extraordinary beauty of Stourhead with its theatre of Classicism and stories from Antiquity.

In my work however, I have attempted a ‘face off’ with beauty.  To have merely reproduced spectacular vistas would have been, for me, giving way to the Beast that is Beauty’s underbelly - where aesthetic pleasure becomes anodyne or soporific and where fear of corrupting an image prevents us understanding what that image has become. 
Instead, I have sought to collapse oppositional forces - of proximity and distance, of light and dark, of classical and contemporary – into the single plane of the images.
Here, as in the gardens, what is obscured is as important as what is revealed.

Click on image for enlargement

Temple of Flora  2006

Archival digital print from colour transparency.  112 x 112 cm

Apollo from the Walking Tree 2006

Archival digital print from colour transparency.  112 x 112 cm

The Pantheon   2006

Archival digital print from colour transparency.  112 x 112 cm

Flora from the Watch Cottage  2006

Archival digital print from colour transparency.  112 x 112 cm

Pantheon from Tree 645   2006

Archival digital print from colour transparency.  112 x 112 cm

Pantheon from The Shades   2006

Archival digital print from colour transparency.  112 x 112 cm

Temple of Apollo   2006

Archival digital print from colour transparency.  112 x 112 cm

The Saloon 2006

Archival digital print from colour transparency.  112 x 112 cm