In May of this year, I will be placing a series of
ceramic patchwork pieces in the elegant Georgian red drawing room of Uppark, a
beautiful National Trust property in West Sussex.
I will be exhibiting alongside ten other artist's, all making work in response
to the history of the property and the stories that surround the personalities
who lived there. It will be part of Unravelling the National Trust, a
series of exhibitions that aims to showcase extreme or conceptual craft in a
site-specific context, showing in three different National Trust venues across
the south east from 2012 - 2014.
I have chosen to look at the property’s more recent
history. In 1989, devastation was
wreaked on the property when a fire, which started on the roof, ended up
gutting much of the house. As the fire burnt downwards, a desperate race
began to remove as many of the artifacts, paintings, textiles and furniture
from below. Chains of Trust staff, firefighters and volunteers passed
precious items out of the rooms and onto the lawns. Eventually ceilings
and fireplaces caved in, plasterwork and remaining items were smashed and all
ground floor rooms were left exposed to the sky. Some family members still
lived in the top floor rooms and the remains of their possessions fell down to
mingle with the rest.
In the aftermath of the fire, four foot of damp ash
and rubble lay in the rooms. This was
gathered and stored in regiments of black dust bins out on the lawn, waiting
for their contents to be painstakingly sieved and sorted. A decision to restore the house to 'the day
before the fire' was made by the National Trust and before long, a community of
specialist craftspeople took up residence in makeshift workshops and offices in
the grounds of the property. Old skills were rekindled and expertise
shared. Old fragments were mixed with new replacements and slowly Uppark
was rebuilt. Tides of people came and went in the six year process,
insurance estimators, builders, craftspeople and conservators until finally Uppark
reopened to the public in 1995.
Whilst many of the original fragments eventually
went back into the house, being “far more precious than a replacement” (Peter
Pearce, the National Trust’s Managing Land Agent for its West Sussex
properties at the time of the fire), many ceramic and plasterwork fragments
remain stored in a room, stacked high in bread-trays. Grouped by artifact, the pieces are
discoloured, still sooty and showing bubbled distress marks of the searing
temperatures they endured. This series of photographs share some of the
gems I found in preparation for making the new work.
Uppark is the third exhibition of the
Unravelling the National Trust series and is due to open on May 2nd 2014
and will run for 6 months till 2nd November 2014.
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| This fragment illustrating Uppark is from the last private owner's personal dinner service. It survived the fall from the top floor where famly members still live. |