Dreams of a Winter Night: Geraldine Pilgrim's installation in the bedroom at Belsay Hall.
Last week, Mike Figgis blogged about his most recent project since filming Kate Moss in her drawers for Agent Provocateur: making an installation for a couple of rooms in Belsay Hall, a stately home in Northumberland owned by English Heritage, set in spectacular gardens and even boasting its own castle.
Commissioned by English Heritage and the Arts Council of the North-East, a collection of creatives including actor Tilda Swinton, Dutch fashion designers Viktor & Rolf, musician Antony (of "And the Johnsons" fame) and artist Geraldine Pilgrim have filled Belsay's empty rooms with sound installations, projections, sculptures and photographs, creating a hallucinogenic evocation of the history of the house.
Yesterday, I went for a look myself. While installations inevitably work better than others, it says a lot for skilful curation of the project that everyone from toddlers to grannies - the whole range of people you might expect to see at a stately home on a bank holiday weekend, in fact - were appreciating different facets of the art on display.
For instance, any fans of the Cure would have appreciated the moving wallpaper projections, that then revealed nightmarish mucus-filled human orifices, by artist Francesca Steele. Hew Locke's malevolent jewel-encrusted effigies in the old dining room tapped into the same fetishist vein as the Chapmans' McDonald's sculptures, while Kandis Locke and Nicholas Till offered a critique of imperialism in the library consisting of hundreds of mini-Parthenon marbles arranged on the shelves.
Tilda Swinton, her husband John Byrne and their children's installations of a train set going round the Eiffel Tower and the Sphinx were catnip to the young families who were out in force, while Viktor & Rolf's neoclassical silver robot in a silver-dress provided more than eye-candy for fashionistas. The most powerful installation was by Antony with William Basinski, who filled the cellars with a disquieting chilly drone.
The whole project uses an amazing space in a daring and provocative way, and like the Angel of the North you pass on the way to Belsay, confirms the north-east as an immovable site on the cultural map of Britain. As a bank holiday destination, it has to beat Ikea.
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