Construction in progress

Helen's steel frame

With the white card presentation and final design schemes chosen, construction well and truly begun on 9^th February. Now a couple of weeks down the line things are certainly coming together.
Helen has successfully drawn up all the patterns for her costume. She has constructed the main steel frame and the panniers to be attached that achieve the typical 18th century dress shape. She is now currently experimenting with manipulating her chosen transparent material, organza, that she will use to fabricate the bodice and the dress. 

Emily's Steel and chicken wire
frame, the silhouette of a house keeper. 

Emily has built a steel and chicken wire structure to support and provide a base for her paper based sculpture. The shape of the frame is suggestive silhouette of a former house keeper. For Emily's design it is important the silhouette is clear to the visitors so the concept can be easily understood. This is why she decided to build a main structure which she can then dress with paper notes to achieve the final design outcome. Emily is now currently experimenting and researching various papers, handwriting, vocabulary and spelling of the 18th century which will help her to represent Sir Henry Harpur Crewe's personality creating as close to an authentic finish as possible.  

Ruth's wooden doll's house structure

Ruth's progress is going well. She has created the base structure for her dolls house including doors and lighting spot at the back. The architecture on the outside is coming along to. She is including details from the North front of Calke with the columns and windows. Once this is done, Ruth will Paper Mache the inside and out with newspaper which she sourced from a scrap store. The six scene inside the house will be created next week once the doll house is finished. Other details like the luggage tags and paper soldiers still need to be created. Ruth has sourced several suitcases from Lakeside Arts Centre who have kindly lent her them for the final exhibition at Calke. These will be piled up representing the evacuees at the house during the Second World War. 

Emma's felted hare body

Whilst doing some artist research, Emma came across the technique of needle felting through the works of Zoe Williams. Emma felt inspired to learn the art of needle felting through the artist’s beautiful and unusual felted animals. Although time consuming Emma’s animals are starting to take shape with a lovely child’s toy like take on a rabbit as pictured to the left. Emma is pleased with her progress so far and is hoping to create 2 or 3 animals to exhibit in amongst Calke Abbey’s collection of Taxidermy. Whilst continuing to complete the animals she will also begin to think about the cases in which they will be displayed and how the works will be labelled.

Jayne's cardboard doll's
house

A children's room divider, a ride-along-horse, a dolls house; just a few of the items I have constructed over the last couple of weeks for my wallpaper inspired installation. I am now faced with the challenge of replicating the various wallpaper patterns which I will either stencil directly onto the objects or hand print/paint onto paper which can then be used to cover the items. I intend to experiment with laser cutting, screen printing and ink transfers in order to find an appropriate way of replicating the wall coverings within the limited amount of time we have left.

Chloe's hand painted paper leaves

Chloe has built a free standing wooden structure that can be placed on a window sill of the principle stairs . She is now currently intricately painting paper leaves, experimenting with papers and painting techniques that she will use to create paper leaves and vines on mass. 
These very brief descriptions of each piece shows we are all progressing well through the construction of our final installations. The next ongoing challenge is to think about the exhibition as a whole and start planning the material that will support and explain the exhibition to the future visitors of Calke Abbey.

Jayne

Untitled no more

Today we had to finalise a title for our exhibition. It was a much more challenging process than we had anticipated. After much discussion, and multiple suggestions we finally came up with a title that complements all of our artworks.

"Calke Abbey. Revealing the Past."

There is a nature of revealing  in all of our responses. Helen and Bryony are revealing the characters of Sir Henry Harpur Crewe and Nanette Hawkins in costume form. Through Chloe's intricately crafted leaf sculpture, the disruption caused by the natural environment is realised. Ruth reveals the role of Calke Abbey in WWII through her contemporary doll's house. Emma's hand felted animals brings focus to the seemingly unknown collection of poems written by Sir Vauncey. Emily's paper sculpture suggests the communication between Sir Henry Harpur Crewe and his house staff. The wallpaper installation brings focus to the often overlooked collection of Calke Abbey's wall coverings.  

Jayne

Meeting with Sue Crabtree

"The House of Bling" leaflet.

Today we had the opportunity to meet Sue Crabtree the curator for ‘The House of Bling’. She was involved in a project based at National Trust property Tattershall Castle in 2009 which involved a team of exceptional artists with newly commissioned art works which spread throughout the buildings vast spaces. Weaving facts and fiction together ‘The House of Bling’ offered a rare and beautiful richness of an altogether kind. 

It was a great chance for us as a group to ask Sue about the experience of working alongside the National Trust and the artists involved in the project. For us it was really nice to hear it from someone who connected with our work. The meeting was very informative and she advised us on how to promote and develop our work into a professional context. 

Some advice that Sue gave us was that our pieces needed to be as visually effective as possible and not to use lots of writing as audiences will find it too much to take in. Also research and documentation is vital throughout the process. Sue also gave us some Do’s and Dont’s when working with organisations like the National Trust. 

It was a great opportunity for us to talk to Sue and share our design ideas for Calke Abbey. We are really grateful for the time Sue took to talk to us and she is hopefully coming to see our final works at the opening event at Calke. 

Ruth

The Ice Book

Just one of the pages of the pop up book.
Images taken from video on The Ice Book website

As quite a few members of the group are interested in creating paper based sculptures, we took the opportunity to see an intimate performance of The Ice Book; a paper and light based miniature theatre show devised and created by Davy and Kristin McGuire. The performance brings a fantasy world to life through the combination of intricate paper pop-up pages and video projections.

The performance is currently on its UK tour. To see the performance and tour dates, please follow the link to the official website.

The Ice Book  

Jayne

Presenting our Ideas

This afternoon, we met with the National Trust team to present our final design ideas through a white card presentation. A white card presentation is a meeting in which models, samples, and final design drawings are shown and discussed. It gives the designer a chance to talk through the design scheme and the meaning behind it, explain how it will work and allows for practical concerns and possible problems to be communicated. The National Trust team seemed to be impressed by the array of installations we have designed. The afternoon was spent talking through our ideas discussing the practical limitations and concerns the National Trust Team had, in addition to finalising a location for each artwork.


The relationship between Sir Henry Harpur Crewe and Nanette Hawkins has interested Helen throughout the entire design process. Helen’s 18^th century influenced costume design made from translucent and fragile materials, embodies the delicate nature of Nanette’s character and portrays how her husband’s possessively protective love made her become his most treasured and precious addition to his collections. 

Sir Henry Harpur Crewe most famously known as the “Isolated Baronet” communicated to his staff and family through notes and letters so was not often seen by the other residents of Calke Abbey.  It is this curious character both Bryony Ruth and Emily have been inspired by. 

Bryony Ruth suggests the almost invisible nature of the Sir Henry Harpur Crewe through her disguised costume design that will seem to disappear and blend into the building and contents of Calke Abbey.
 It was not uncommon for residents of well-established manor houses, such as Calke Abbey, to communicate to the servants and staff through instructional notes, either given directly to the staff or left throughout the building for the servants to find. It is this overwhelming nature of instructional direction Emily captures in her design; a flurry of hand written notes falling into a suggestive silhouette of former a house keeper.


Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe, also known for being an isolated character similarly chose to communicate with his family and staff through letters. But he did in fact have a loving relationship with his children, all be it in his own way. He used to write short and often playful poems about animals for his children. It is this relatively unknown collection of Vauncey’s Verses that Emma has chosen to use as inspiration for her design. Emma plans to create one or two of the animals through experimenting with various craft techniques which will then be displayed in amongst the collection of taxidermy at Calke Abbey.

Through a contemporary take on a traditional doll’s house, Ruth’s design captures Calke Abbey and the role it played within WWII. With layered “slides” depicting different scenes, the doll’s house set on 10 period suitcases, captures the lives of the soldiers and the 10 evacuee boys that served and sheltered at Calke Abbey during the war. 


Chloe has been inspired by the relationship between Calke Abbey and the natural environment that surrounds it. Through the illusion of vines and leaves forcing their way through the window of the principle stairs, Chloe's design exemplifies the physical deterioration of Calke Abbey caused by the natural environment surrounding it. 

As a visitor walking from room to room it’s easy to overlook what provides the backdrop for the overwhelming collection of portraits, furniture and artefacts; the wall coverings. It is this overshadowed collection I intend to bring focus to. Through replicating the intricate patterns of the wall coverings, I intend to encapsulate and decorate recognisable artefacts to provide a greater and more obvious physical presence of the wall coverings found within Calke Abbey. 

Jayne

Research Day

Yesterday we all went to Calke Abbey to look through the research document the National Trust held about the house. We wanted to gather information that would help us accumulate ideas for our final exhibition.


We arrived at Calke Abbey at 10am, and the National Trust workers assisted us to the back room where all the research documents were stored. We were all grateful for these resources they had provided, and the knowledge they personally shared about the house. It was very informative and, most of all, interesting. There was an overwhelming amount of research in the archive at Calke Abbey, so it was difficult to know where to start, and what direct everyone was going to take. Everyone spent most of the morning sifting through research notes, from the detailed timeline of the family members the estate was inherited by to the building’s architecture and the delayed/gradual modernisation of the building and the life within it.

Research Day 

Everyone gained an insight into the lives of the people who had lived at Calke in the past. Also, it was particularly useful reading the inventories of each room. The inventories showed the spaces and objects we will be working with/around in the way they will be when the house is open to the public.


Emily and Helen were particularly interested in Henry Harpur Crewe ('The Isolated Baronet), who married Nanette Hawkins (The Lady's maid), as well as Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe. They were interested in these two due to the unsociable personalities these men had.


Helen predominantly found the collections of newspaper articles useful, when finding out further information into the life of Nanette Hawkins.


Bryony and Ruth also focused their research mainly on the character of Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe. They also concentrated on the Schoolroom and the objects within it. They discovered that the schoolroom was a bedroom for George Crewe and then also became a Schoolroom for Sir Vauncey and his children as well. What was fascinating about this room was the surrounding walls had Newspaper backing the wallpaper.

Bryony’s research led her further, when she read about Sir Vauncey through the servant’s accounts. She discovered that he would refuse to see the servants in person and he would communicate to them through letters and notes. Sir Vauncey would also sack the servants for ridiculous things like letting the fire get too hot or cold.

They both wanted to look at the history of the Schoolroom further. They have decided to collaborate and create a sculptural approach focusing on the Armies occupying the space at Calke and focus it within the Schoolroom. Within the room is a Doll’s house, which they aim to use as their main source of inspiration and possibly using it as a representation of the house itself.


Opposite, Jayne was keen to create a response to the various fashions of wallpaper; the distinctively different patterns of the age and the various means by which the papers would have been made. There was little information available about the precise wallpaper history but she found it interesting how the wallpaper depicts a living experience through time, from the 18th century through to 1960's. Jayne also found that each time the National Trust started to conserve and fireproof the walls hidden treasures were uncovered. In the drawing room for example, various colour schemes were uncovered behind the mirrors and the gold and white Pugin style wall covering that can be seen today. 

This trip to Calke Abbey helped us decide the direction we are all planning to take, for example; investing further into a particular character or theme. I thought it was a privilege to be looking through all the collected research the members of the national trust have gathered.

Chloé

Calke Abbey Group

                                                    

 Chloé