National Trust, Peckover House and Garden, Wisbech

24 February – 18 November 2018

Our commission for Peckover House ran throughout the 2018 season.

We spent much of 2017 delving into the archives at Peckover House in Wisbech and exploring the histories of both the Peckover and Penrose families. At first glance there would seem little that could connect the surrealist artist, Roland Penrose, to his Peckover aunts and grandfather and their strict Quaker lifestyle; but the archive reveals their shared love of art making, collecting objects and an interest in enlightenment through a greater understanding of the world around them.

Roland Penrose described in some detail the inspiration he took from his visits to Peckover House as a young boy and how the objects and books inspired his interest in art and later surrealism. Much of Lord Peckover’s collection of rare books and curios have long since been dispersed from Peckover House, but a clue to the variety of eclectic objects can be found in the small cabinet of curiosity that remains.

In the Drawing Room, we created an installation of collages and sculptures that employed surrealist techniques to imagine a contemporary collection for Peckover House. We led a number of workshops with the local community and made new artworks inspired by the themes explored in Transitions in Time.

Thank you to Loukas Morely, Will Webster and Gareth Wild for the creative collaborations on this project.