Room Write Up BY THE DOVETAIL FOUNDRY FOR THE NATIONAL TRUST 21 Septemebr 2014
Contact: The Dovetail Foundry 566 Kingsland Road, London E8 4AH hello@dovetailfoundry.com
Castle Drogo Creative Interpretation by The Dovetail Foundry
Mr drewe’s room
ROOM OF GLASS A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of forces of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human life. – Walter Benjamin, The Storyteller
In this room, we attempt to provoke a representation of the Sublime, a concept that continues to inspire art and literature but was particularly important in the understanding of the landscape in 18th and 19th century Britain. The word ‘sublime’ is derived from two Latin terms: sub (below, up to the point of); Limen (limit, boundary, and also lintel - the heavy beam above an arched door that bears the weight of the house above). Curiously, although the word ‘sublime’ is used today to mean ‘superb’ or ‘most refined’, its earliest usage in the 1700s was ‘beyond the reach of human understanding’ - the terms ‘awful’, and ‘terrible’ were synonyms - a feeling of awe or terror. Engaging with the Sublime landscape creates a sense of human frailty against the vastness of nature. 17th to 18th century landscape painting often featured towering mountain ranges, deep chasms, violent storms, volcanic eruptions or avalanches. JW Turner was perhaps the most prolific of the Sublime landscape painters, his large paintings expressing the sense of rapturous light and atmosphere on rough seas. In the 20th century, historical events such as wars, famines and revolutions have caused artists to return to the sublime as a mode of representation - although their descriptions are closer to Apocalypse than Ecstasy. In 1917, the artist-soldier Paul Nash attempted to convey the horrors of the battlefield and in so doing touched on the sublime theme of indescribability: the devastation is ‘unspeakable, utterly indescribable’, ‘Godless’, ‘blasphemous’, ‘nightmare’. The fragility of human life - the precariousness of existence against a backdrop of nature so vast as to be beyond our control, of timescales too vast to comprehend, the repetitveness of abstraction, the emptiness of the Absolute.
Ungraded sample images from Time Lapse
Time Lapse This video installation uses a combination of timealtering techiques: time-lapse, slo-motion, long takes and close-ups to create a meditation on natural cycles of flourishing and decay. Roughly following a year’s cycle, it mixes sublime images of massive and furious natural phenomena with intimate and delicately observed moments. Within that framework we will play with time and progression, bending the rules and subverting expectations enough to place emphasis, while still using a year’s season cycle as the structuring element.
We hope to set up an arrangement whereby the video is projected onto the central panel of the ceiling, recalling the sublimity of the painted ceilings of rococo churches. Viewers will stand below the video and this twist in perspective enhances the overwhelming nature of the work, subverting the traditional way moving image is viewed. The three major points that we are looking at are: - The sadness and inescapability of death as part of nature’s cycle. - The constancy and beauty of natural processes, life itself. - The overwhelming power, destructiveness and savage beauty of the natural processes around Drogo. The entire video will be around 7 minutes in length, and will repeat immediately as it finishes.
Glass models Against this backdrop of a wild and mutable nature, a series of glass models of varying sizes are situated around the room. Each of the models is an abstracted depiction of part of the castle, simultaneously paying homage to Lutyen’s geometric formalism, and creating a sense of the fragility, preciousness and smallness of human endeavour. Drawing upon object design contemporaneous to Lutyens (Art Deco, Wiener Werkstatte), the glass models are a series of art objects that obliquely reference the precious objects of times past: regal jewellery, the coloured glass windows of Rajasthani royal palaces, semiprecious stones.
Crafted objects from the Wiener Werkstätte
In the stormy east-wind straining, The pale yellow woods were waning, The broad stream in his banks complaining, Heavily the low sky raining Over towered Camelot; Down she came and found a boat Beneath a willow left afloat, And round about the prow she wrote The Lady of Shalott. — alfred, lord tennyson Coloured glass in a Rajasthani royal palace
3. Tags In the previous Room of Dreams visitors will have picked up other visitors’ tags In the Room of Glass visitors will be invited to deal with the tags they have selected in one of two ways. The first option is to post it into a distinctive, small post-box. This will echo in design the small, iron Post Office boxes. One option is to shred the tag! It will be fed into a shredder - and the remnants of shredded dreams will be seen decorating the glass models in the room. The other option will be to post it into a letterbox. It will be a distinctive object, given a crest which clearly echoes the design of Drogo’s insignia, and painted black or white. The implication should be that this sends on, or at least preserves the dream sentiment of the tag. In a corner in the next room in the visitor journey, the Estate Room, the visitor will encounter another postbox, identical to the one found in the Room of Glass. The absolute similarity of the post boxes makes clear that there is a process in action whereby dream tags are taken from the room or glass and ‘sorted’ next door. This post-box is open, tags spilling out of it onto a desk, which looks like it has recently and temporarily been vacated by an administrator of some sort. They are sorting the dreams, slotting the tags into a wooden filing cabinet with marked sections. This is a space and task for a volunteer to perform when they can, and the arrangement of the ‘workstation’ is such that should the volunteer be otherwise engaged the point of dreams being bureaucratically sorted is still make clearly.
Decaying concrete WWII bunkers
Precious objects - visual references
Example of post box
volunteer Talking points: – The Castle at threat - the feeling of peril, vulnerability – Death of Adrian Drewe in WWI - Julius Drewe’s despair – Cycles of natural landscape, constant change, rebirth & renewal - unlike a building which must be managed – Aspirations and dreams being broken by events outside your control (e.g. War) - the need to replan or rebuild
Castle Drogo Creative Interpretation by The Dovetail Foundry
LIBRARY
room of models
The Library opens up our relationship to the house – the lives and dreams of the characters who lived in and built it, and its place within the natural landscape of Dartmoor and the wider social landscape of change at the beginning of the 20th century.
The Room The library will have some original furniture within, including the grand piano and the bookshelves and books will also be uncovered. It will have some atmosphere of a room used by the family. A series of photos of the family are displayed in frames, standing on the grand piano like in an ordinary house. Although this might not be a historically accurate means of display, it immediately brings a degree of familiarity (perhaps unheimlich) to the Drewes - though the photos might be in black & white, the setting is very well understood. Beneath / beside each photo - a caption describing the person: “Frances Drewe loved Venice” - a succinct statement giving real personality to the photo. Perhaps a small drawing of an object from the collection. A few postcards out of frames. These will then relate to the items and stories in the facade, and gives volunteers a hook to tell visitors about each character. Other items from the Collection displayed in the room include the decorated screens (perhaps around the lantern) and the intricately veneered cabinets, which relate to both of our installations.
Lantern
A model of the lantern in machine-cut plywood, wherein the panes of glass each contain silhouetted illustration, lit from within. It is made up of 12 (instead of 16) sides, each of which presents a panel of 3 x 5 panes. The illustrated panels form a series of narratives that are both linear and non-linear, fact-based and fictional. These narratives seek to tell different and diverse stories of rise and fall, social climbing and falling from power, from stories contemporary to the period 1914-1930, to medieval myths, to recent 21st century epics. Why this lantern? Architecturally, this lantern is derived from the cupola an Italian renaissance/baroque device which was added to the top of a dome, allowing light to be let in. It is used extensively in the English baroque, for example topping many of Wren’s churches. John Soane adapted this to flat roofs in the top lit banking halls at the old Bank of England, demolished in 1925 - this is undoubtedly from where Lutyens draws his influence. Castle Drogo draws upon medieval, folkloric architecture, an architecture of military fortification. Within this,
Possible illustration style
Lutyen’s lantern is raised upon a series of steps, almost giving it the air of a pagan, archetypal monument - yet referring to the rich heritage of classical architecture which infused the English Baroque. Julius Drewe was attempting to build himself into the fabric of Victorian society, by building a ‘Seat’ and fixing and inscribing a history. The lantern, with its rich meanings, provides an ideal structure for our imaginative interpretations of fact and fiction. We are taking an object which has multiple meanings and using it to bring to light the tales behind and within Drogo itself. Initially used as a way to ‘shed light’ on the servant’s quarters, we are using the lantern it to shed light upon the emotions, coincidences, desires, tragedies and quests which are woven into the story of the Drewes and the castle’s origins, illuminating the hidden history of the house. Those tales will in turn spark off moments of connection and recognition for modern audiences, as they access larger human themes.’
References This gridded artwork draws on narrative forms such as medieval cathedral panel paintings. In particular, The Maesta by Duccio di Buoninsegna (Siena Cathedral’s altarpiece) tells the story of Christ’s life - like a comic strip, with important events illustrated in each pane - unlike a comic strip, it starts at the bottom and works upwards. The central image takes up two panes, and is an image of the Crucifixion. The topmost figures are angels, separated architecturally - an eternal image contrasting with the temporal, earthly scenes below. Through these means, the artwork is a cosmic diagram as well as a narrative piece. Similarly, Italo Calvino’s book The Castle of Crossed Destinies uses a grid of tarot cards to describe a series of stories. He cleverly reads the grid forwards, backwards, up and down, each row and column describing a different narrative drawing on the archetypes described in Italian folk tales. Another type of gridded diagram much later became the Snakes and Ladders board. Boards like this were used in temples to teach morality lessons, where a player’s progression up the board represented a life journey complicated by virtues (ladders) and vices (snakes), emphasising the role of karma. This board was plentifully annotated with philosophical and moral instruction, embellished with drawings of men and women, animals and gods, and is interestingly architecturally subdivided - representing different states and outcomes.
Snakes and ladders
Our lantern, rather than being flat, is made to be viewed in the round, allowing for subtle fugue-like relationships across and around squares that make up each window. Moreover, we refer to our themes of rise and fall - the inevitability and recurrence of change - history repeating itself through archetypal stories. Recalling a carousel, images of horses and vehicles move around the lantern, connecting up the panels to each other. The format also recalls a mandala, another type of Indian cosmic diagram, more symmetrical and balanced than the ‘snakes and ladders’ board.
Diagram of the grid of tarot cards describing stories from The Castle of Crossed Destiniies
Maesta altarpiece in Siena Cathedral by Duccio
Bhutanese Mandala
Stories for the Lantern We will have a continuous story of the Drewes circling the bottom of the lantern, so it reads as an unbroken story going around the object. The Lantern uses the Drewe’s life and the building of Drogo as a device to tell the story of social and cultural change at the beginning of the 20th century. We are still in the process of developing these stories, summarised as follows. (Please note images on the left are conceptual references not visual references) 1. Ancestors A family tree with roots and branches. The body of the tree is inscribed with the names of the Drewe family members past and present. The negative spaces between branches and leaves are populated with smaller illustrations of another story. This story relates parts of the traditional Holy Grail narrative. This refers to Drewe’s identification with medievalist culture and to our theme of quest narratives.
Illustrated family tree (1)
The story of the Grail is a story of searching for meaning, a chivalric medieval romance - more subtle and domestically complex than simplistic macho adventuring. The Grail represents the quest which is concerned with voyaging but also evokes a problematic return - the character or circumstances are different from when he departed. The story of Castle Drogo is one where the castle is completed in a world which is irrevocably different from the world in which it was built. 2. Childhood This panel will describe Drewe’s childhood in the context of the Victorian establishment. A Victorian house is shown as a machine – producing good young men for the Empire. Contrast the production of nice middleclass young men (turning into their fathers) with the life of servants, in the attic and ‘below stairs’. A small boy (Drewe) is standing on the front steps of the house, in a neat schoolboy suit, his boarding school trunk packed beside him. The figure of his father in another panel echoes his bearing and dress, but in ‘grown-up’ versions: they are one and the same. All of this is related back to a picture of Queen Victoria on the wall of a room, the central queen bee of the whole system.
Snakes and ladders (3)
Ideas of reform, of flourishing but rampant capitalism, of a world changed but with legislation lagging behind. Through the back windows of the house we can see nearby slums, shifting into terraced housing. 3. Travel as a young man Julius Drewe’s travels as a young man, to China and the Far East for tea trading. His story forms a backdrop and is interwoven with the story of Aladdin. This is told in ‘comic strip’ panes but these are jumbled around the panel. The narrative is traced out by snakes and ladders, turning the whole panel into a game. Willow pattern parody (5)
4. Success and selling his business The story of Home & Colonial stores - how it was sold to other companies, conglomerated, merged, expanded, taken-over, broken-up. Referring to the real story of changes in business, this panel puts Drewe’s efforts in the context of 20th century economic history. 5. Meeting his wife, having kids A willow pattern-style illustration, using and adapting the popular motif that adorned tea service crockery before and during the Victorian era, and referring to Julius Drewe’s first shop ‘Willow Pattern Tea Stores’.. The lovers’ tale is adapted for the Drewes, using a motif of roses. 6. Wandering and finding a path This panel charts Drewe’s search for meaning and decision to embark on building Drogo. It links his personal quest with mythological and historical searches for meaning and moving forward through the trope of seafaring. A map showing a procession of boats from different eras that might have crossed the Mediterranean, weaving in moments of stories from The Odyssey and imagined Ancient Map with boats; Lindisfarne Castle (6) moments contemporary to Julius Drewe’s life. The boats cover Phoenician trading ships (who were involved in tin trading in Devon and Cornwall), Greek galley ships, Crusader ships, tea clippers, steamer ships, Drewe’s yacht, contemporary migrant boats. Allusions to shipwreck, storms and faith. The final panel is of dry land - and an silhouetted skyline of Lindisfarne Castle. 7. WWI A long procession on a conveyor belt. The first images are of granite blocks - alluding to how this interrupted the construction of Drogo. Pack horses, young men, married men are conveyed by this machine to war. The images get quite horrible, bodies piling up, men desperate to get out. Eventually the bodies turn into gravestones, and the Cenotaph (or another of Lutyens’ iconic war monuments). 8. Changing the landscape The Dartmoor landscape is changed by Drewe’s intervention - the coniferous clifftop at Drogo is cleared. More or less concurrently, the forests of the Flanders are leveled by shelling in WWI. Adrian’s death changes the dynamics of the family and the building work. Using our theme of the natural landscape as a metaphor for the social landscape, Julius Drewe is pictured as the Fisher King, an ancient legend that also inspired Eliot’s The Waste Land. He fishes, as Castle Drogo is half-completed; behind him is an arid landscape of burnt tree trunks, barbed wire, cliffs and craters. Some smaller details are shown within this landscape: a mourning family (could be the Drewes), a forest of crosses. There is a suggestion that this is both the Dartmoor landscape and the Belgium forests that were flattened by war. The uppermost panes show a distant bridge of 9 arches, where the middle arch
Procession (7)
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me Shall I at least set my lands in order? London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
– TS Eliot, The Waste Land
STORIES 1. Ancestors 2. Childhood 3. Travel as a young man 4. Success and selling his business 5. Meeting wife & Having kids 6. Wandering and finding a path 7. WWI 8. Changing the landscape 9. Building a home 10. Old Age 11. Giving building to NT 12. Celestial bodies
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TYPE OF PICTORIAL NARRATIVE A: Sequential (like a comic strip) B: Monoscenic (single scene) C: Simultaneous (diagrams, maps) D: Continuous (repetition of figures)
Early Lutyens cottage; Viceroy’s House New Delhi (9)
ca ta st
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Diagram of lantern stories
is collapsed, with shapes of crosses amid the rubble. This refers to both Eliot’s poem and Stanley Spencer’s Sandham war memorial murals. (8 arches and a central panel with cascading crosses) 9. Building a home The panes are used horizontally to depict a timeline of Lutyens’ work. The top panes are pre-war cottages in the Arts and Crafts style. Castle Drogo occupies the central panel - surrounded by war memorials on either side. The lowest panes are post-WWI buildings - and buildings that ultimately represent the establishment: New Delhi, Manchester Midland Bank, the unbuilt Liverpool Cathedral. The notion of creating a safe ‘home’, as well as an interesting structure, is conveyed by an intertwined narrative which tells the story of a group of rabbits, peeping out from and amongst the buildings, slowly moving from place to place, finding a comfortable spot, digging a burrow and settling in to their created ‘home’. The elemental idea of creating a resting place is shown in an unambiguous way which can be read by adults and children alike.
Landscape (8)
10. Old Age Julius Drewe in Old Age: mapping out his life and where he has come from and been; reflecting as he approaches death. 11. The Drewes donate the building to the NT A suggestion of water leaking and oak leaves taking over the Castle, with the oak tree representing both the NT and the wild Dartmoor forest around. 12. Celestial Bodies A star chart, based on Durer’s cosmological maps showing stars and their constellations as illustrated figures. Alongside some traditional constellations drawn from Greek mythology (Orion, Virgo etc), this star chart shows the new Gods - the Banker, the Politician, Default Man, as well as medieval crusaders and Victorian soldiers. The faces of the new characters are drawn from contemporary TV series including The Wire, House of Cards, etc. It reflects the amoral ‘wars’ that such characters are waging amongst themselves, how their desires, emotions, and choices dictate and corrupt the world in which the rest of us live. It draws us full circle, taking us back to the first story of the family tree.
Durer - Celestial Map of the Northern Sky, 1515
Facade Having already introduced our characters, the facade refers to them again within the context of our interpretations and themes. The facade is derived from one of the original Lutyens sectional drawings in the archive. However, the windows are open to allow views into the building, and small boxes lit from window are visible through the apertures. Contents of the Facade There are 13 (tbc) openings in total, each with an object from the Collection. The objects tell a story in miniature about how they were acquired by the family, or hint at themes that we explore later in the exhibition. These objects are everyday items, by contrast, the setting of the objects is very slick and contemporary - halftone photos printed over the perspex, bright colours or novel materials. This perhaps refers to Julius’ penchant for the latest technology. Possible items are shown on the next page. Facade design This will be CNC cut from a single pieces of timber, and hand-coloured with watercolours if necessary. The lines from Lutyens’ drawing will be etched into the wood.
Draft layout of facade
volunteer Talking points: – Drewe family members and hobbies – Picking out and explaining stories around lantern – Explaining objects inside facade – Story of how lantern came to be added to Drogo’s design
Example of contemporary display style
Items from Collection to be used in Facade
Items from Collection to be used as reproductions in the Facade
Castle Drogo Creative Interpretation by The Dovetail Foundry
boudoir
estate room
In the room we explore contemporary ideas of nature: a landscape that forms a part of the national identity, yet is made up of many ‘foreign’ elements; a wilderness that is highly managed and conserved, yet depicted as ‘wild’; a natural world that is identified both as a powerful yet simultaneously perceived as under threat. We mainly use photography, maps and a few installed objects to explore these tensions. In contrast to the preceding ‘nature’ rooms, which contain 3D objects, illustrations and moving image, this room uses the aesthetic of frozen and preserved nature, schematic representations, and paused fragments of time. This draws attention to the beauty and particular qualities of the Dartmoor landscape and also plays with ideas of verbatim records of a space, of freezing nature at the moment we find it most appealing. This room examines those impulses to pause and preserve. We tend to have an image of what out ‘natural’ landscape is, and how it should be maintained as such. But the landscape changes constantly, and plants/animals/ landscapes that once seemed alien and new can become part of the fabric of a nation very rapidly. This begs the following question: - By managing and protecting a landscape - are we essentially halting evolution? Isn’t this as artificial and interventionist as any other kind of landscaping? “Conserving” a wild landscape is to the 21st century what Capability Brown’s picturesque temples and rolling lawns were to the 18th - landscaping nature, but rather than his visual ideal, we now take our aesthetics from a conceptual ideal. - By the same token, without intervention British landscape would not return to an idyllic wilderness the forces in the modern world which impinge upon ‘wild nature’ are varied and powerful, and without management those spaces themselves might be either eradicated or severely compromised. Part of understanding these processes is gaining a sense of the time-scales the natural world can works upon, so different from our own perspective of time. From the thousands of years to the few days, life-cycles in nature
vary greatly and it helps us see our own place in a wider natural tapestry to understand this. How humans find their own place in nature, how what we preserve has emotional meanings for us is a key part of the room. Taken as a whole, our installations in this room are about interventions in nature: making people aware of the active role that humans today play in structuring and controlling the natural landscape.
Photographs Frozen Time On the wall facing the door are a series of striking photographs of Dartmoor. With the detail that mediumformat photography allows, they embody a powerful vision of the contemporary landscape. The photographs pick out various themes from the room: – Ancient time-scales – Management and conservation – Preservation and natural heritage – Dominance, oversight and apparent control These images crystallise the majesty and the frailty, and through the skill of photographer Luke Montgomery’s image-making, embody both the exact moment being captured and how it forms part of a long chain of change and development. The past and future can be read in these images, as well as the fleeting loveliness of that split second.
Enumeration A collection of smaller photos, maps and charts about various aspects of Dartmoor ecology are laid out on a long table. The documents might include: – – – – –
Contemporary OS maps Historic maps Geological maps Species diagrams (e.g evolution, food chains) Photos of collected specimens
This explores the theme of the scientific understanding of the landscape which is an integral part of conservation and management. We have already touched upon the idea of the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ with the Facade in the Library. Cabinets of Curiosities were encyclopedic collections of objects … including natural history , geology, ethnography, archaeology, … “[The Cabinet of Curiosities] was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world … symbolically the patron’s control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction.” Besides the most famous, best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums. (Wikipedia) Like the entomologist’s display case, elements of Dartmoor are separated from their natural surroundings; grouped, photographed, documented. A series of acorns, and of feathers, a group of dandelions, twigs arranged by expanding girth. All of these are crisp, photographed images, neatly laid out like specimens on the table.
Illustrated Maps Walking routes and what you might see r/K selection theory relates to strategies that species (animal, plant, human) trade off in reproducing: - r-strategy species are like birch and willow - wispy and weak, but living fast, reproducing quickly, and dying off. These are also known as ‘pioneers’ because they will adapt to wasteland - their rapid cycle of birth and decay prepares the ground for other plant and animal species. - K-strategy species such as oak and horse chestnut take much longer to reach maturity, but when they do they can dominate a landscape. Newly colonised landscapes are frequently r-strategy, millenniumold landscapes are K-strategy. We explore and explain these types of landscape through two different scale maps: a smaller scale map picking out areas of birch and willow forest, closer to Drogo; and a larger scale map picking out oaks, chestnuts and beech. Here is an opportunity to describe landmarks or locations of specific areas of conservation by the Estate team (e.g. veteran oaks). Furthermore, we use a third map which picks out buildings or villages of interest in the wider Dartmoor area. In doing so, we draw parallels between Estate conservation and Building conservation - the natural landscape and the built landscape, and how each forms a part of what we consider the English landscape. Bringing this back to Drogo and the Drewes - a familial lineage is a continuous management project - is Drewe only remembered because of the intervention of the NT? These maps further encourage visitors to explore and understand the Drogo Estate. Each is highly illustrative (it will be recommended that visitors take a map for orientation on their routes.), using the species as a texture that fills the map, and explains the significance of the illustration.
Possible map illustration styles
Painted Eggs This installation combines the age-old practice of decorating eggs with new illustrations of ‘non-native’ species in the UK. As much as we think of chickens, horses and sheep, sparrows, sweet chestnuts and elm being a part of the English landscape, these were all at some time foreigners, introduced by invading armies or foreign trade. Certain naturalist movements seek to remove all non-native species, but where do we draw the line? Egg symbolism is ancient - for its associations with fertility and renewal, farmers would break an egg on their hoes when ploughing the land to ensure good returns. Its shape, thought to be similar to the cosmos, means the humble egg features in a good many myths of origin. Like many pagan symbols it was reappropriated by Christianity to become the decorated Easter Egg, the hard shell imagined to resemble the tomb of Jesus breaking open on Easter Sunday. In our installation, this ancient symbol of fertility is uncomfortably juxtaposed with illustrations of ‘nonnative’, feral species - crayfish, grey squirrels and parakeets (which are “as British as curry” - London Wildlife Trust). Some of these species are an accepted part of the British landscape (sparrows and sweet chestnut were introduced by Romans) but others are controversial - Defra permits culls of parakeets to ‘counter the potential threat…to national infrastructure, crops and native British wildlife.’ But where do you draw the line at what is acceptable and not? Satisfying, an egg has no natural demarcations for such lines to be drawn. We will use traditional dyes that have been used for centuries, but at some point originated from afar (indigo, madder, turmeric) to provide the base colour for the illustrations. This brings us back to the idea of trade and exchange explored in Sweet East - what is ‘natural’ and what is ‘foreign’? When does something brought by humans become a traditional material?
“For if the entire history of landscape in the West is indeed just a mindless race toward a machine-driven universe, uncomplicated by myth, metaphor, and allegory, where measurement, not memory, is the absolute arbiter of value, where our ingenuity is our tragedy, then we are indeed trapped in the engine of our self-destruction.” — Simon schama, landscape & memory
volunteer Talking points: – Conservation and change of the estate, the NT’s role in maintaining it – Drewe’s attitude to his Estate, hobbies - fishing etc – Walking routes, landmarks, species to see
Castle Drogo Creative Interpretation by The Dovetail Foundry
Mr drewe’s room
ROOM OF DREAMS In the middle of the journey of our life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was lost. – Dante, Inferno The Room of Dreams is about losing and finding your way - how aspirations, however small and fragile can guide one through the wilderness. It describes the moment of loss of direction: losing your way in a deep forest; an introspective search; the need to create a space amongst divergent paths. It also crystallises what those guiding dreams might be. There is a tension in the room between the confusion and mystery, and the solid and safe: a dream of a longedfor destination acting as a guide out of the woods.
1. Modern Millefleur At the centre of the room is a four poster bed, which has been adapted to create a bower-like enclosure, recalling the arbours found at the four corners of the formal rose garden at Castle Drogo. The bed-arbour is draped in a textile, whose pattern draws upon the tradition of densely illustrated medieval floral textiles - patterns which Victorian craftsmen such as William Morris also drew upon to create their rich textile prints. This material will be heaviest and thickest at the base, but then seemingly become unwoven into skeins of thread. As if in a fairytale, floral patterns escape the flatness of the print - becoming three-dimensional petals and leaves - and hang loose from the top of the arbour like ivy vines or wisteria. Together with the Mirror, this ‘deconstructed’ textile conjures up the sense of a thick, deep and untamed forest. The cool greens and browns and splashes of colour that typify deep English forest, and the sense of a pathless, almost suffocating density of foliage.
The Unicorn in Captivity, a medieval French tapestry with rich sacred symbolism
Example of threads / petals
a character is lost in the forest. The nature that we are representing in this room is a wilderness of possibility - liminal, transgressive and numinous, recalling the nature-spirit superstitions of pre-modern societies. Nature in this room is particular - referring to a deep symbolism of flora and fauna, where species had very definitive uses and meanings.
Millefleur The crowded pattern of plants and flowers that is found as a background in medieval tapestries, known as Millefleur, Pre-modern societies possessed a far richer vocabulary is distinctive in that the plants were very accurately of living species, a result of being surrounded by, living illustrated, with species chosen for symbolic purposes. amongst and dependent upon nature. This symbolism could therefore be used dynamically, as a language For medieval people living in close proximity to the creating a complex poetry of flora and fauna, rhymes natural world, the forest represented life-giving and rhythms to which we today are largely deaf. For our abundance, dynamic uncertainty, and the possibility of design, the specificity of trees, leaves, flowers, ferns transformation. This is evident in folk and fairy tales, or and undergrowth will be essential to creating a unique Arthurian romances where critical events take place when pattern and backdrop to the room.
William Morris - Marigold
Hortus Conclusus The bed-arbour creates an enclosure, a clearing that allows space for the creative act of making a place into a home. It recalls the romantic notion of putting down roots and building your future, protected against the confusion of the forest, or the profane and dangerous world outside. The Hortus Conclusus is a common symbolic device found in medieval painting, demarcating or denoting a sacred space. Amongst other references, is symbolically paralleled with the arcaded cloisters found at the centre of medieval monastic complexes, which were subdivided into four quarters often with a fountain at the centre.
2. Quilt On top of the bed is a handmade quilt. This strongly geometric quilt features large central panel with a quilted image of Drogo. The patchwork is bordered by a series of quilted illustrations of staff and
volunteers’ homes - creating a record of the people who keep the castle running today. The geometry of the quilt derives from the Rose Garden, where illustrations of volunteer homes occupy the position of the square or oblong beds of roses. The quilt will be subdivided - recalling the cloister garden - but also positioning a new path leading up to Drogo. This recalls a trope found in countless fairytales - the castle at the end of a long journey. Our quilt will be a commemorative record of people who have worked and volunteered at Drogo, creating an intriguing document for visitors to inspect and decode. The building they to choose to live in tells many things about a person. This artwork reminds visitors of what architecture means on a local, personal level - that architecture does not have to be grand houses and castles but can be the buildings they use and are attached to everyday. Simultaneously, it describes Julius Drewe’s ambition for Castle Drogo as a home - not a military fortification as historic castles might once have been. It deliberately contrasts with Castle Drogo’s austere and monumental form, with an illustration that is soft and cosy which is, after all, what many people want when making a home.
Sketch layout of quilt following geometry of Rose Garden
Lutyens preliminary sketch of Drogo
Virgin Mary in a Hortus Conclusus
Example of contemporary quilt
Indian Chintz - tree of life
3. Tags Visitors will be invited to write dreams, thoughts and wishes on small tags which they will add to the end of the bed/bower. The tags, which built up, will themselves ressemble a forest of aspirations. They will be posed a choice of two questions which will prompt them towards thinking about their hopes and wishes for the future (e.g. What is the safest place you remember? What is the house of your dreams? - tbc). Visitors can add as many tags as they like, but they will also be obliged to untie one previously left by other visitors and carry them into the next room, where they will be instructed further.
Examples of willow sculptures
4. Mirror A fourth element of the room will be a convex mirror framed in a dense tangle of woven willow, the total around 50cm in diameter. Symbolically, the mirrror evokes ideas of truth, self-knowledge and the advance of modernity. Mirrors were became more accessible objects in the Middle Ages, though they were still precious and signified wealth. They were initially convex, able to show a panoramic reflection of the space they were placed in. This clarified an idea of the mirror being a reflector of a wider truth, a beholder of a wider sense of the world than the human eye can make out. In tales from that era the mirror can be clearly seen to have a complex relationship with ideas of truth and self-knowledge.
Convex mirrors in medieval paintings
Around it, the woven willow shape will swirl and draw the eye to the centre of the object where the mirror’s surface glistens. In some respects natural, in others artificial, the gleaming texture nestling in the woven surface will invite a closer inspection. The willow adds a texture which is not found elsewhere in the exhibition - the texture of the forest outside. Symbolically, the willow, which is found throughout Dartmoor, is an ‘R-strategy’ plant - a plant that grows and reproduces fast but dies off quickly. Like the birch, it is a ‘pioneer’ species, claiming new land for other species.
The Room of Dreams is a space in which the ideas of ‘natural’, pagan experiences in wild woods are beginning to be challenged, with aspiration to control and manage being articulates, amongst the mysterious wilderness. Willows can, in fact, live for hundreds of years, but only The mirror too is a bridge between two worldviews, the with human intervention. Here, we use it as an oblique folkloric or pagan and a more recognisable, Christian way reference to Julius Drewe’s pioneering sensibilities. of viewing the world. The undulating texture of the willow and the rising As an object the mirror will provide a focal point for the canopy nature of the bed/arbor both evoke trees without eye, and a lively textural contrast with the woven willow being too literal. The twists and curves of branches and that surrounds it. Small enough to be intriguing but not the sense of a living organic organism will be strongly overwhelming, the mirrors will be central in the room, conjured, as will the romance and delicacy of tree forms fixed to the plywood boards which cover the window. but in objects containing more allusion and mystery.
Rough sketch of willow mirror
References & Motifs Green Man / Three Hares The Three Hares is a mysterious motif found in church ornamentation in Dartmoor, across the south-west, and through medieval sacred sites following trading routes across Europe and the Middle East.  The Green Man also found in various churches across Dartmoor, and is said to contain a rich symbolism of fertility and vitality. Often seen as a liminal, ‘trickster’ figure, Green Men are perceived to celebrate Nature, Renewal and Rebirth. Green Men decorations are used by Lutyens in some of the carved wood panels in the Dining Room. Hedge steeping The form and texture of the mirror frame will recall the tradition of Devon hedge steeping - an age-old tradition of manipulating natural - in this case still growing - materials into a form to enclose livestock. The ancient Celts are thought to have believed that the souls of the dead lie in the hedgebanks. Enchanted Forest From Wikipedia: “[Enchanted forests] are described in the oldest folklore from regions where forests are common, and occur throughout the centuries…. They represent places unknown to the characters, and situations of liminality and transformation. The forest can feature as a place of threatening danger, or one of refuge, or a chance at adventure.”
Three Hares and Green Man engravings from churches in Dartmoor
K-strategy and r-strategy species Birches and willows are ‘r-strategy’, species that grow quickly and die off quickly. Oaks are K-strategy species, which grow slowly but last for hundreds of years. Was Julius Drewe a Willow trying to be an Oak?
volunteer talking points: – Dartmoor Forest: practices, myths and legends (Green Men, Three Hares, Plants and Trees) – Info about quilts, willow crafts – Story about Lutyen’s design of Rose Garden
“If ever l saw blessing in the air I see it now in this still early day Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.” — Laurie Lee, April Rise
Castle Drogo Creative Interpretation by The Dovetail Foundry
Mr drewe’s room
Service corridor Leaving there and proceeding for three days toward the east, you reach Diomira, a city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with lead, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All these beauties will already be familiar to a visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality
Cartoons by Lutyens drawn on P&O writing paper, from his trips to New Delhi
of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when days are growing shorter and the multicolored lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman’s voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time. – Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities The long service corridor is transformed into a bazaar of worldly objects, including Drogo’s extensive collection of copper. Soup tureens, plant pots, tea canisters, bright brass bowls. Visible from the Dining Room, a collection of jelly moulds becomes an oriental city skyline, recalling Lutyens’ Delhi adventures and also the source of the Drewes’ wealth. There will be plenty of space to accommodate and display items from the collection - preferably items that the Drewes collected during their travels. We intersperse this with items that we have selected or created, which will help present the items as a journey.
The visitor becomes a traveller through some of the trade routes travelled in the late 19th - early 20th century. Each of the windows will be transformed into a homely scene, as if -rather than looking out to the garden - the window looks into an interior lit living room in a faraway land, on a long journey home.
1. Sweet East Sara Muzio’s installation of stacked Jelly Moulds originates from a short film inspired by one of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. This film (1min) will be playing on a small (6”) screen with two sets of headphones. This prose-poem (above) - which is also displayed at the entrance of the corridor - opens the novel, its fairytalelike language immediately setting up a dreamlike city, located in the distant East. It describes the moment of alchemy when the base materials of which cities are made (silver, bronze, lead, gold) transmute into nostalgia, memory and desire. This happens through inhabitation – the filling of the world through colour, sounds and smells and tastes. It describes the envy that a visitor feels for those who are at home, exotic or foreign that it may be.
The shelving will be arranged so that the visitor is led on a maze-like journey through the objects, but is also encouraged to look more closely at items on the way. Various devices will be used to create the sense of a long journey: – Coloured lighted from the ceiling fixtures will help to create a ‘different’ atmosphere – Bowls of dried bay leaves, rose petals, tea, cinnamon sticks (check with Lucinda) etc will be interspersed within the storage to create the sense that the Collection is living storage such as that in a bazaar. – We would like to seek sponsorship from luxury perfume brand Ortigia. Ortigia are named after the peninsula in Syracuse, Sicily, a place with a rich and multi-cultural trading history. The scents are subtle, warm and complex, and speak of faraway lands. We would place 3-4 room diffusers or bowls of scented crystals in the corridor, creating a fragranced space that would instantly transport you to a different place. – Reproductions of some of the Drewes’ many postcards from their travels. – Items that speak of travel/transport - Julius Drewe’s yachting memorbilia, model boats, maps/books of foreign places, etc – Sheer coloured fabric hanging against the windows and silhouetted figures create the sense of looking into other people’s houses, distant from home. – A series of small origami boats made of writing paper - referring to the many trips that Lutyens made from England to India and South Africa - and the letters he wrote on board. – Maps describing trade routes of the British Empire – Illustrations of characters from the storybook (see later) appear, tarot-like, on postcard-cardsized drawings which stand amongst the objects. Their meaning, seen at this stage, is symbolic Model boat from the Collection and mysterious and references the tarot-studying Madame Blatvatsky, one of the occultist founders of Theosophy, to whom TS Eliot is perhaps referring to reading tarot cards in The Waste Land.
Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, Had a bad cold, nevertheless Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe, With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she, Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor, (Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!) Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks, The lady of situations. Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel, And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card, Which is blank, is something he carries on his back, Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find The Hanged Man. Fear death by water. — TS Eliot, the waste land Postcards from the Drewes’ travels
2. Sweet Home Father Ted: “OK Dougal, one last time. These cows are small... those out there are far away.” At the end of the service corridor is the a wider space, which will look at models and play: both serious and lighthearted. This space explores the perspective of Drogo for children: both to help them imagining living there as a Drewe and also to show how life was for servant children in that era. Miss Mary Drewe’s Dolls’ House At the end of the corridor, partly visible through the maze of the Collection, and facing the Dining Room, is Mary Drewe’s Dolls’ House. This acts as a contrast to the more ‘exotic’ contents of the corridor, to come in and out of view as one progresses towards it. Following from a theme explored in the Library, We use the idea of models and miniature scaled buildings to explore feelings towards buildings as objects of desire. Lutyens was also involved in designing an extremely elaborate Dolls’ House for Queen Mary in 1924. From Jane Ridley - Lutyens, the Architect and his Wife: “With the dolls’ house Ned could escape from the disappointments of the real world, creating a world in miniature where he was in complete control. That the makebelieve world was shared with a real-life queen made it all the more compelling”. Dolls’ Houses were originally used as teaching tools for young ladies who would be in charge of the household so they could see and understand whole system in operation, and as such represents a microcosm of the established system. Mary Drewe’s Dolls House will contain the traditional Dolls’ House Furniture from the Collection. However, at the time of the building of Drogo, WWI was underway – leading to the horrible finale of certain national rhetorics about duty and honour. It was also the turning point for the women’s suffrage movement. As women took up mens’ roles during the War, this eventually helped to turn public opinion in their favour. Within the house, furniture will be arranged in unexpected and in some ways playfully subversive ways – questioning ideas of roles within the household and illustrating dramatic moments in the history of Drogo: for instance a young man, about to become a soldier is seen packing, with the help of his mother; a young servant girl alone in the nursery playing with toys that are not hers; and other scenes which humanize the history of the house. The Dolls’ House, though presented with traditional furniture, will be reframed to talk about gender roles, societal flux and unrest, and the balance of power in a home.
The juxtaposition of these two elements questions the idea of ‘play’: is it pure escapism into the imagination, or is it a training or rehearsal for adult life? The Cabinet Dolls’ House The other Dolls’ House will remain in place on the far wall. Its contents, arranged by us, will be more fantastical and surreal. The earliest version of what we think of as Dolls’ Houses originated around the 18th century as converted or specially made cabinets: ‘The earliest known European dollhouses were the baby houses from the 16th century, which consisted of cabinet display cases made up of individual rooms.’ This house will have furniture arrange in dreamy and symbolic tableaus. Rooms can be arranged to map preoccupations, fantasies, hopes and fears. Using and recontextualising objects from within the collection (a gravy boat becomes a bathtub, a bedroom is filled with giant roses) a sense of fantasy and fun is evoked.
Laundry Chest Each cubby hole of the laundry cabinet will be decorated in such a way that it is transformed into a landscape. Decorations will be simple and robust, but enough to create a sense of a place. Maybe a green lawn with tiny trees, a bathroom with a shiny floor, a horse’s stable, multiple spaces are possible. In each a few cheap but charming models will be placed so that visiting children can play. This will echo the manner in which a piece of furniture can be divided into small cubicles (‘rooms’) and can transform into a very different space, a tiny house or home: through a child’s or player’s eyes it becomes a different world, on a different scale. This will be an object which is touchable by visitors. Having seen other examples of toys and models which are fascinating but out of reach, at last young visitors can arrange and play with models and use their imaginations to create tiny worlds and stories.
3. Story book The book will link the Bunty House in the garden with the Castle and the wider story of Drogo. The Bunty House is a smaller scale dwelling, nestled in a tiny garden – through a child’s eye perspective this could be the house of a small, magical person. This fun idea and the different scale of building is ripe for interpretation . The children’s book will link these elements through conjuring up a strong sense of who exactly the Bunty House is home to and how it came to be. The narrative will furnish the reader’s imagination with characters
and a backstory for the Bunty House, so that when it is encountered outside it will be replete with meanings, stories and characters. For visitors, to unexpectedly encounter the Bunty House ‘for real’ outside in the gardens after having read about is as such a fantastical object will be a thrilling interruption to the ‘reality’ of their experience at the castle. The story will concern a young girl who lives at the castle – happy but slightly lonely. After an initial intriguing encounter with a magical character, in the gardens of Drogo, she has to hurry home for dinner and bed. Later, alone during a stormy night while the adults are occupied with a party, she ventures out of bed, through the castle and into the gardens. She re-meets her new friend, they have a small adventure, and at dawn have to part. The character can be an invocation of certain sprites and local legends which we will touch on in later rooms (Room Of Dreams) – a nature-dwelling personage whose habitat is changing or is threatened. Woven through the story is the idea that this person has somehow lost their home, and are exposed to the wild elements. The next day, the young girl builds or persuades her parents/a friendly gardener that the Bunty House should be built. This she hopes will be a home for the displaced character that she has befriended. Will he return and find this shelter? The story gives a good opportunity to illustrate the magical aspects of Drogo, and also how the different times of day and ways of seeing the castle can completely transform it. For example, the long shadows and silence of the castle at sunset, the spookiness of empty corridors, wild trees and battlements visible through windows, the rose garden can become, for a small person, a regimental marching ground, full of stiff, barbed flowers, and the circular lawn can seem almost infinitely large. The illustrations will be 2 dimensional, printed and in colour. The book size will be approximately in the 8” x 10” to 8-1/2” x 11” range. It will be conform to industry standards, being either 24 or 32 pages long.
volunteer Talking points: – Drewe family travels, Julius Drewe’s life as a tea merchant – Edwin Lutyens’ & Emily Lutyens’ differing relationships with India / Far East – Dolls’ Houses as teaching aids, how servants would have experienced Drogo – Children at Drogo - experience of family during WWII.