123. Exhibitions in Beautiful Gardens - With Pippa Shirley and Lorraine Lecourtois

Break Out Culture With Ed Vaizey by Country and Town House

On our last podcast of the summer, we’re talking to Pippa Shirley, Director of Waddeson Manor and to Lorraine Lecourtois, Head of Public Exhibitions at Wakehurst, about two of Britain’s most beautiful outdoor spaces, both showcasing some wonderful art.

Waddesdon Manor is the Renaissance-style chateau built in Buckinghamshire by Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild in 1874, with extensive Victorian-style gardens, a parterre and a Rococo-style aviary and woodland. The two major artists exhibiting there are the British artist Catherine Goodman, who also co-founded the Royal Drawing School with King Charles III, and the celebrated Portuguese artist, Joanna Vasconcelos.

Joanna has installed a 12-metre-high sculptural pavilion called ‘Wedding Cake’ next to the 19th century dairy, clad entirely in colourful ceramic tiles. Joanna describes this beautiful architectural folly and sculpture, her most ambitious commission to date, as ‘a temple to love’. It’s fully immersive and you can walk around it – and even get married in it. Meanwhile, Catherine Goodman is showing her paintings inspired by the beautiful olive trees in the Rothschild estate in Corfu and by Ovid’s ‘Metmorphoses’.

The wild botanic garden of Wakehurst, which is part of Kew, has over 500 acres in Sussex of diverse landscape and is home to the Millennium Seed Bank. There’s the epic ‘Planet Wakehurst’, the UK’s largest art installation, by Catherine Nelson and a new exhibition ‘Rooted’, showing Chila Kumari Burman’s largest neon work to date (ten metres high) and works by Joseph Hillier, Little Lost Robot and Geraldine Pilgrim. There’s also an audio work from Hidden Orchestra and Tim Southern that promises to bathe people in calming sounds.

We’ll be back in September. Have a great summer.