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Attingham Park (National Trust) Shropshire
Meadow Art's next exhibition will take place between August 2008 and September 2009 at Attingham Park, a 4,000 acres 18c National Trust property with about 200.000 visitors a year. The exhibition will be centred on the concept of the ‘shelter’ as a changing indicator of man’s relation to the land. It will consist of new commissions and existing work by ten leading contemporary artists. From seeking shelter against the wilds of nature to finding refuge in the natural environment, man has used and abused the land in very different ways. How does the natural world come to provide sanctuary from the increasingly hostile environment we created to give us shelter in the first place ? How have we moved from sheltering against wild life to having to provide shelter for it from the encroachments of mankind ? How will this sheltering function play out in future land use? The increasing pressure on the environment has brought closer the shadow of cataclysmic scenarios and with it ideas of escape and refuge. There are strong social and cultural forces at work in the vast park of Attingham. It stands in a benign and lush position where men have always found shelter from prehistoric and Roman settlements, right up to the USAF base during WWII. The grand classical landscape park we see today actually conceals an early industrial site. The site by the Tern river was once so intensely used by the burgeoning iron industry that it was deemed too polluting; the iron works were shut down in the 1730’s and the village that had housed the workers demolished. That is when Attingham's landscape was reclaimed by its owners and remodelled into a vast ‘pleasure garden’ by Humphry Repton. It is now ‘held in trust for the nation’ by the National Trust and used by 200,000 visitors a year. These include visitors to the house but also thousands of users who regularly walk in the 4,000 acres of preserved land.
New Commission by: Keith Wilson, Henry Krokatsis, Ivan and Heather Morison Cornford + Cross, Winter/Hoerbelt Existing work by: Susan Grant, Charlotte Gyllenhammar, Christina Mackie |
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