House of Beasts Opening

House of Beasts Opens Saturday

Meadow Arts amazing new House of Beasts exhibition will open on Saturday 2nd July at National Trust's Attingham Park in Shropshire.

The exhibition explores the differing relationships between people and animals: from the bonds between us and our pets and prized livestock to the battlegrounds of pest control, and everything else in between.


Most of the Meadow Arts team have been busy installing the works at Attingham over the last couple of weeks. Here are some photos of the team in action, working with National Trust staff to get the artworks safely in place...

Installing Mat Collishaw's The Beast in Me

Susie MacMurray, in the lorry with Herd

Nina Saunder's Refuge, about to be installed

Kate MccGwire's Vex in the entrance hall

Preparing for House of Beasts

Decisions, decisions...

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!

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.

The front of Attingham

 

Art Picnic Postponed

Art Picnic Postponed Due To Bad Weather

We have had to postpone todays event because the weather is awful: I am sure that none of you wanted to be eating a picnic in the tipping rain today either!

The good news is that we plan to hold the event on a later (and sunnier) day, so look out for more news on the Art Picnic soon.

Philippa Lawrence, the artist who made the Public Commission artwork Barcode FB814 at Mortimer Forest, was at the woods yesterday to prepare the site for today's event. Barcode FB814 looks amazing there, and we really hope that you will be able to join us for the rescheduled Art Picnic when we have arranged a new date for it.

Art Picnic

Bring your picnic and come and join us in Mortimer Forest on Sunday 12th June

We are really looking forward to going down to the woods to have another look at Philippa Lawrence's specially commissioned artwork Barcode: FB814.

Philippa will be there on the 12th June to lead the arts activity session and we will all be bringing our picnic lunches too.

We hope to see lots of you there to join in the fun!