Opening the doors

Our country’s landscape is dotted with manors and estates. They have inspired novels, paintings, plays and films and hold a firm place in the public imagination. But these grand houses are often private, built centuries ago by the landed gentry and carrying a legacy of exclusivity and exclusion. Bastions of beauty, they can also be symbols of inequality. Bodies such as the National Trust and English Heritage have spent decades opening up such homes for the benefit of the public, but a flurry of recent initiatives is seeing other grand estates invite people in – and using craft to engage with history, landscape and community.

Wolterton is an 18th-century Palladian Hall in Norfolk built by Horatio Walpole, the younger brother of Britain’s first prime minister, Robert Walpole. The house now belongs to the Ellis family and opened its doors to the public this summer for the first time in a generation, with an arts and culture programme encompassing exhibitions and residencies. Overseen by artistic director Simon Oldfield, the programme aims to create a dialogue between contemporary culture and the estate’s history.

A residency from Clay Research Group, a Norwich-based collective of potters and researchers spearheaded by ceramicist Rachel Kurdynowska, began in May and lasts until December. The project focuses on waste materials dredged from Wolterton Lake earlier this year, including reed ash, calcined oyster shells, silt, soil and quartz.

The group investigated the materials, including through test firings. It has built a small kiln in Wolterton’s walled garden, powered using wood from the estate, inviting the public to observe it in use. “Our process of gathering material, making and returning to fire draws direct correlation to the Hall’s construction in 1741, when clay was extracted from the local area to make bricks for the building,” says Kurdynowska, adding that historical research turned up evidence of a brick makers just outside of the estate’s boundary wall.

The group has produced encaustic tiles as a way of better understanding the range of materials gathered from Wolterton; the tiles are also decorated with a star-shaped flower motif taken from an upholstered chair in the estate’s main hall. Not just of the site, these creations are for the site too: upon the residency’s conclusion, the tiles will be installed as part of new building work at Wolterton. The wood kiln will remain as a “resource for future artists”, says Kurdynowska.

At Kelvedon Hall, an 18th-century country house in south Essex that remains a family home, Australian artists Tais Rose Wae and Heath Wae undertook an immersive residency resulting in site-responsive works for an exhibition this autumn. The couple moved into the Grade I-listed house for a month, living with their two children and creating new pieces in a dedicated studio on the grounds. They did so as part of an initiative run by The Dot Project– an exhibition programme for emerging and mid-career artists – and HeritageXplore, a digital directory of Britain’s privately owned heritage sites.

“It’s been profound how the house has shaped what we’ve created,” says Tais Rose, a weaver with Aboriginal heritage. “I have been really struck by that timeless nature, where it feels exactly like it might have felt 200 years ago,” she adds, while sitting in a grand library on the last day of her residency. Tais Rose spent time walking through the grounds, studying the architecture and engaging deeply with the house’s history – particularly that of the Channon family who bought the house in 1937 and some of whom still live there – culminating in the creation of three new weavings.

In one work, stretches of fine gold thread pick up on the golden picture frames throughout the historic home, as well as the opulent neo-Baroque pool house that owner and politician Chips Channon commissioned in 1937. Tais Rose recalls being inspired by the “beauty of this era”, but also the complicated nature of that beauty, resulting from a colonial culture “that took a lot from so many other cultures”. Woven between the structure of the weft, the golden threads represent historic “golden embellishments and the systems that upheld them”. The public can visit the house and exhibition through guided tours, learning simultaneously about Kelvedon and the artists’ creations.

Meanwhile, site-specific craft biennales at England’s country manors demonstrate the ways in which makers can engage with a place for the benefit of all. This September, for example, saw the fourth Crafts Alive festival, an event held at Rodmarton Manor in Gloucestershire every two years since 2018 (bar the pandemic disruption) and organised by the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen.

Crafts Alive brings together creative practitioners to make work in response to, and sited consciously in, the Grade I-listed Arts and Crafts manor, built between 1909 and 1929 and belonging to the Biddulph family. This year’s event, themed Flowers and the Maker, featured the work of 73 makers, drawing inspiration from the home’s gardens, decor and belongings.

Studio Tuft, the Stroud-based practice of rug maker Jessie James, was inspired by decorative flowers found on furniture and objects in the house. The delicate purple, yellow and red flowers painted by British designer Louise Powell on an antique spinet crafted by French instrument maker Arnold Dolmetsch informed James’ Wild Meadow rug, while climbing flowers on a red cabinet in the hallway formed the reference for her Red Regosa rug.

Textile designer Liz Lippiatt, meanwhile, turned to the snake’s head fritillary flowers that grow at Rodmarton in the springtime, remarkable for their checkerboard pattern. The same flowers also inspired the design of the home’s original brass sconces, made by a local blacksmith. Lippiatt created a handprinted linen bedcover with cushions and devore scarves in a soft palette of purple, pinks and pale greens featuring snake’s head fritillary motifs.

Crafts Alive builds on a long tradition of fostering craftsmanship at Rodmarton, reflecting the home’s roots in the Arts and Crafts era. The owners who commissioned the house’s construction, Claud and Margaret Biddulph, were passionate about the movement and welcomed local villagers into the manor for woodwork and embroidery classes. John Biddulph, the current owner, embraced the opportunity to host Crafts Alive as a way to “re-establish the link between the house and craft workers”, he explains. Public workshops also accompanied this year’s festival, with classes including leather working, willow weaving and puppet-making.

Harewood, the 18th-century, Grade I-listed country house in West Yorkshire, began its craft-focused Harewood Biennial in 2019, exhibiting work made or presented in response to the home. Through themed public displays, including special commissions, works have drawn on the architecture, interiors, collection and landscape of the estate. They have also addressed its problematic history, having been built for Edwin Lascelles, 1st Baron Harewood, who owned slaves in the West Indies. Still home to the Lascelles family, Harewood has operated as a charitable trust since 1986, inviting the public through its doors to engage with an extensive range of cultural events.

For the 2019 Harewood Biennial, Max Lamb created a rug for the drawing room, made using leftover wool from a local textile factory and dyed using natural materials harvested from the estate grounds. In 2022, the same room hosted an oak games table and cast aluminium dominoes crafted by Mac Collins, celebrating his Jamaican heritage through the popular Caribbean practice of playing dominoes, and situated poignantly below a historic portrait painting of Edwin Lascelles. Last year’s biennial saw an installation of hand-blocked wallpaper from Mani Kambo, recreating patterns from Harewood’s interiors.

Having taken ownership of hundreds of country homes in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for public benefit, the National Trust integrates craft programming as part of its efforts to involve visitors in the histories of the houses and their collections. Contemporary art and craft are “powerful tools for engaging audiences,” says Annie Reilly, the Trust’s public engagement and planning director, that offer “fresh and participatory ways to connect with heritage, place, and community”.

At Hardwick, a grand Elizabethan house in Derbyshire, the ongoing Woven Worlds programme explores the textile collections of Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, who had the house built in the late 1500s. Core to the programme, the Material Power: Rewoven display brings together the work of 16 contemporary makers responding to, or in dialogue with, the home and its textiles.

Claire Boynton’s quilt Lineage of Fire, installed in the Grand Hall’s fireplace, features a multicoloured phoenix, drawing inspiration from the house’s 1599 portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, painted by Nicholas Hilliard and commissioned by Bess of Hardwick. Through the work, Boynton sought to celebrate the power and resilience of women in later life; the Queen and countess were in their sixties and seventies respectively when the Hilliard portrait was painted

Acknowledging how Bess of Hardwick used her tapestries and embroideries to project her status, the exhibition highlights how “textiles are still being used to express oneself and one’s identity”, says Liz Waring, property curator at Hardwick, and the exhibition is accompanied by spinning and weaving classes for visitors.
Craft in all of its diversity lies behind these grand houses; from stone carving to wood turning, and from weaving to metalwork. Like all creative practice – art, architecture, design – it has historically been co-opted for projects bolstering unequal societies, but it also has the potential for great collective benefit. One residency or exhibition might not undo centuries of public inaccessibility, but through these projects we are able to pull at the threads of past structures and unravel an ongoing story – one in which we, too, might belong.

Events:

Clay Research Group
Wolterton, Norfolk Public firing of the kiln in the Walled Gardens on 27 and 28 September
Info

Heath and Tais Rose Wae
Kelvedon Hall, Essex Guided tours on 29 September, 30 September and 1 October (more dates to be announced)
Tickets - £28
Book

Material Power: Rewoven
Hardwick, Derbyshire Until 31 October £21 (house entry for adult non-Trust members)
Information