January 2009

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I’m sitting in the outdoor café, surrounded by families and couples who are having a tea break during their visit to Sudeley Castle, a beautiful late-medieval house set deep in the Cotswold countryside. Workmen are busy in the garden – not clipping hedges or planting flowers, but carefully manoeuvring contemporary art works into position. A thin crane is bent over like a taut fishing rod, and almost looks ready to snap, as it slowly sets down a new sculpture by the architect Zaha Hadid. The work is one by 16 artists and designers who are exhibiting newly-commissioned work around the grounds. I’m here to meet Mollie Dent-Brocklehurst, the joint owner of Sudeley (with her mother, Lady Ashcombe, and her brother, Henry), who is also the co-curator of this year’s contemporary art exhibition, ‘The Artists’ Playground’.

Mollie emerges, looking surprisingly relaxed despite the usual last-minute installation problems, and smartly dressed in a Chanel jacket. She takes me through a door to the inner courtyard in the private part of the house, where a few signs of family life are in evidence, including two large metal toy cars parked by the wall. Forty this year, she lives at Sudeley, when not in London, with her husband, Duncan Ward, a film-director, and their two children. It is also where the family rabbit lives: ‘It’s my daughter’s’, she says. ‘There used to be two but the dog got one of them.’ The only noise is birdsong, and it is easy to imagine Henry VIII’s last wife, Katharine Parr, who once lived at Sudeley, leafing through her Prayers and Meditations here.

Now in its fourth year, the annual exhibition of public art in the grounds of Sudeley, a mixture of sculpture and installation, is in stark contrast to the history of Sudeley, which has royal connections spanning 1,000 years. Elizabeth I and Charles I stayed here and Prince Rupert used it as his headquarters during the Civil War. What would they make of Henry Krokatsis’s wax cast of a pulpit that hangs off a tree stump? Or Jeppe Hein’s mirror labyrinth (Fig. 1), Carsten Holler’s swing or Michael Craig-Martin’s pink pitchfork that sits in the grass (Fig. 6)? ‘My mother thinks it is the best exhibition we have done’, says Dent-Brocklehurst. Having the family on side is always a help. This may be explained by the element of fun that is the show’s theme: ‘We have tried to create an experience that works with the environment but at the same time is not hard for people to understand or appreciate.’

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