We had a very long meeting at Attingham Park on Wednesday, to discuss the final arrangements for the House of Beasts exhibition. Working with a historic building has its own set of complications, which you would not necessarily encounter in a gallery exhibition.
Curatorially, places are chosen for each piece according to the artwork's relationship with the space, the history of the room and the artist's intentions for the work. It is not so straightforward to put the pieces where you would like to though. Some of the pieces, for example Matt Collishaw's Insecticide piece, are really heavy once they are framed, so firstly we have to establish whether the hanging point in the house is going to take the weight safely. This is a historic building, so you can't just go around banging extra fixings into walls!
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| Matt Collishaw, Insecticide 17 |
Attingham Park is open to the public every day too, so we all went round to finalise placings for the work and to discuss the fine-print of the installation, whilst trying to stay out of the way of the visitors to the building. Not always easy when you mustn't bump into the antiques or step on the special old carpets and rugs.
Attingham is an amazing building, full of stories about its previous occupants, so it is really important for the exhibited works to respond to the rich history of the place and to create a sort of dialogue between the contemporary and the historic. Curating the exhibition has been a case of responding to the place through the artworks, in a similar way to the responses that the commissioned artists make, when they are making new works to place at Attingham.
Next week we are going to start installing the artworks, so we are all very excited to see the works in-situ. They are going to look truly amazing in the very special spaces of Attingham Park.
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| The front of Attingham |
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