A place of quiet magic

Overlooked by a Jacobean manor house, the 100 acres of parkland are home to numerous striking contemporary sculptures.

Among the many artists represented are Charles Jencks, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Andy Goldsworthy, Anthony Gormley, Anish Kapoor, Cornelia Parker, Laura Ford, Anya Gallaccio, Rachel Maclean, Jim Lambie and Pablo Bronstein. Emerging artists are also encouraged. Many artists embarked on their first major outdoor artwork after being contacted by Jupiter Artland’s driving forces, Robert and Nicky Wilson.

You’re handed a map as you enter but much of the fun lies in walking around at will, stumbling upon one striking exhibit after another – a giant shotgun propped up against a tree, a small limestone arch bridge book-ended by inscriptions of ‘Only Connect’, E.M. Forster’s oft-quoted phrase from Howard’s End, a boathouse displaying storage jars containing distilled samples from a hundred rivers across the British Isles.

Tracey Emin’s arrival at Jupiter, a few weeks ago, caused a stir. Her first Scottish show since 2008, is entitled I Lay Here For You, and it includes, in an old-growth beech grove, a colossal bronze sculpture of a reclining female nude.

To quote a writer from the Independent: “She’s lying on her front, face down, her legs and buttocks slightly raised. Is she in the throes of sexual ecstasy? Has she been sexually assaulted? Or is she merely sleeping? Like a lot of Emin’s work, it’s both alluring and disturbing. It’s this ambiguity that gives the sculpture its strange power”.

Two indoor exhibition spaces at Jupiter, meanwhile, yield a collection of Emin monotypes, drawings and small canvases, in which a recurring motif is Emin’s bed – which, in turn, recalls her iconic, late-Nineties work, My Bed.

The monotypes, which are on show until September 30, are absorbing. Emin, reads an explanatory panel on one of the walls, took a lithograph of a faintly-outlined bed as the ground on which to overlay layers of Indian ink, with some being worked deeply, showing couples clinging to each other atop bedsheets, whilst other works are left almost bare, with a lone figure traced out with minimal brush-strokes.

Looking at them, you recall the turmoil that Emin has endured over recent years – the death of her mother, the major surgery that she had to undergo after she was found to have cancer of the bladder.

Of the six-metre reclining bronze, Emin said: “I’ve been wanting to do it since 2010, and I’ve been working up to it and working up to it. My mum dying, it kind of gave me this extra confidence to do it ... When she died I felt so bereft that it was like: ‘Well, f---. Life’s short. Go for it. Do it.’ Because if I mess it up, well, I mess it up. It’s OK, it’s all right. It was like my mum sort of saying: ‘Go on Tray, do what you want to do – don’t hold yourself back.’”

Her works are evidently not to everyone’s taste. On TripAdvisor, a couple of customers let it be known that were not impressed by them.

“There was a terrible Tracey Emin exhibition on (if we’d known this, we wouldn’t have visited)”, said one. To which Jupiter made the eminently sensible reply, the only one possible: “We’re sorry that you did not enjoy our current exhibition. We understand that the exhibition will not suit all tastes but as we have a very diverse collection of artworks on show, we hope that all visitors will be able to find something at Jupiter to engage with”.

Jupiter Artland is the painstaking creation of Robert and Nicky Wilson, who moved into Bonnington House – the Jacobean mansion house that dominates the parkland – in 2001.

Three years after they moved in, they began collecting art for the extensive gardens and grounds. “The idea for a sculpture park came in response to living here”, Nicky, who had studied sculpture at Camberwell School of Art, said in 2009, when Jupiter Artland was opened to the public. “We soon realised it was a special place.”

Charles Jencks, the noted architectural historian, garden designer and writer (and, incidentally, co-founder of the Maggie’s Centres for cancer support), was an influential early mentor at Jupiter. Not only did he create the beautiful Cells of Life – eight landforms, a connecting causeway, and four lakes – here, but he also “designed a series of works and developed the thinking behind Artland as a concept”.

Jencks died in 2019, aged 80, but his work lives on. The terraced, elegant earthworks and small but tranquil lakes that make up Cells of Life are, as the Jupiter map notes, “a landform celebration of the cell as the basis of life”. They are, as more than one critic has said, a place for contemplation and reflection.

There are so many superb sculptures on display at Jupiter. Some are distinctly unsettling, such as the five ghostly Weeping Girls, their faces obscured by manes of hair. When you chance upon them for the first time the effect can be quietly chilling. As their creator, Laura Ford, says, “What I have made for Jupiter are five little girls dressed up as sculptures in positions of high drama which animate the landscape they inhabit”.

Paisley-born Anya Gallaccio’s equally impressive contribution, The Light Pours Out of Me, has been an immediate hit with many visitors despite the feeling of unease it induces. A darkly glittering grotto of amethyst, down a flight of steps, it is surrounded by a black, glistening, jagged top layer of obsidian volcanic glass. The reaction of a Herald writer of a decade ago is as valid now as it was then: “Beautiful and icy cold, it had me shivering and contemplating my mortality, despite the dappled reminders above my head of a perfect Scottish summer’s day”.

Gallaccio herself has remarked: “I would like it to be unsettling for people when they first encounter it. I’d like them to question whether they should enter the gate or not. Then, when they come into the space it is very formal, quite grandiose but intimate, a quiet place for one or two people”.

Equally intimate and thought-provoking is Anish Kapoor’s installation, Suck – a smoothly curving and strangely alluring chute that plunges into the earth to an unseeable depth, and ringed by a 17ft high cage.

It’s difficult to look at the void through the bars of the cage and not imagine being lured down it. The void, Kapoor says, “descends to an infinite depth into which one is drawn. It engenders a sense of dislocation and a fear of being pulled into the abyss”.

Rachel Maclean’s Upside Mimi is an animated video screened in what seems to be an old High Street shop, painted in gaudy colours and arrestingly, jarringly located at the end of a woodland path.

Pablo Bronstein’s Rose Walk has two large white wooden porticos linked by a 25ft-long rose garden. Anthony Gormley’s popular, steel-framed, polygonal structure, Firmament, seems to double as a climbing-frame for young children while absorbing the attentions of their parents. As intimate as Suck and The Light Pours Out of Me is Nathan Coley’s small, enclosed graveyard, In Memory. Its headstones are devoid of names but as you sit on the small bench you contemplate the people who have passed out of your own life.

And thus it was that an unsuspecting visitor from overseas, a young man in his twenties, perhaps, made his way into the graveyard, taking the place to be empty, and backed away in fright when he suddenly saw two people calmly sitting on the bench. We apologised to him profusely.

For information visit jupiterartland.org