Modern Manors.(castles as art galleries)

Byline: Photographed by Christopher Sturman.

As timeworn English castles turn their gardens into galleries for contemporary art, Patrick Kinmonth finds new inspiration taking root among the ruins.

As I was speaking to a princess of my acquaintance recently, the conversation turned to castles. "We have an enormous portfolio of them," she said, sighing. "If your home is your castleor rather, your castle is your homethat's fine, but in the modern world it's a matter of finding a point to having one, especially when life really revolves around cities. You need to see them in a new light or get rid of them." I nodded in sympathy. "And if my family is anything to go by," she added with a wrinkle of her splendid nose, "they can be divisive."

True, this is not an obvious castle moment. Castles seem too defensive at this juncture: barriers coming down, healing financial wounds, mutual support, and let's-end-the-war. But it's at this very moment that the tables have been turned, and, sure enough, those optimists whose parapets sit lightly on their shoulders have discovered that a castlein its extreme architecture, its outrageous grandeur, its very irrelevanceis a provocative frame for the gestures and propositions of modern art.

"It casts a new light on the art and on the placeit feeds both, I think," says Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst as I join her after wandering through the romantic gardens of her castle, coming across startling sculptures at every turn. Sudeley Castle, left artfully half ruined by her ancestors the Dents (whose gloves warmed every fashionable hand in nineteenth-century England), was romantically rebuilt centuries after its sack in 1643, during the civil war. The castle lies like a broken string of pearls in an oyster of hills in the west of England. Mollie, who shares Sudeley with her mother, her brother, the ghost of at least one of Henry VIII's wives, and 1,000 years of history, embarked on a series of installations of new art there.

"We started it about four years ago, when I was working at Gagosian Gallery," she says. "The art scene in London had become more and more global, but it was all very urban and confined. So my cocurator, Elliot McDonald, and I thought it would be interesting to take that energy outside into the landscape, and we ended up here, at home." Placing existing works on the grounds grew into commissions fabricated for the site. "Incidentally, it has brought a completely different audience to Sudeley, who found the place amazing, and a new audience to the art, who never would have stepped inside a gallery."

It is easy to see Sudeley, with its supremely refined Gothic architecture and its ancient gardens among primeval oaks and yews, as something settled that speaks of peace. But the castle has been subjected to a violent history, and the violence of some of the art in the early installations awakened the tremors of its past and shook it into the present. "But now a lot of young artists are not interested in being part of that late-twentieth-century violence and offensiveness that characterized a lot of British art in the nineties," says Mollie. "The art itself does not have to challenge norms in order to be valuable, but it can still take time for new kinds of beauty to be recognized as such." The Sudeley installations have been part of that process, coaxing an atmosphere of enjoyment and pleasure and providing a portal to sometimes "difficult" works. "It's a new role for the historic houses, which have been forever sanctuaries from the contemporary, to celebrate it and frame it and put it at their heart. The artists have been very involved, feeling out a place for their work."