Mark Hearld's Compton Verney

Back in 2018, artist Mark Hearld curated the rehang of the Compton Verney Folk Art Collection, the largest selection of British Folk Art in the UK.

Often growing out of local craft traditions, folk art might include decorative works made for the pleasure of the maker – or objects created with a specific purpose in mind – perhaps weathervanes, shop signs and farming implements.

The collection was originally gathered by Andras Kalman. Many of its objects offer an insight into the everyday lives of ordinary people, both rural and urban, through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Painted inn signs and trade signs, among them a boar’s head and a padlock, sit alongside whirligigs, decoys and Staffordshire figures, as well as a harbour scene by Alfred Wallis.

Mark sought to “soften the space and make it more domestic”, and responded to the collection with new work of his own. As a counterpoint to the military quilt at the far end of the gallery, he created a large-scale collage composed of individual pieces – in effect a paper quilt, populated with motifs that echo the collection and with figures drawn from his own menagerie of birds and beasts.

As part of his curation, Mark Hearld created a new wallpaper, Compton Verney, which we were honoured to produce, and the paper took its place within the redisplayed collection.

The wallpaper was the first thing Mark thought of when planning the rehang: a way of linking the collection with the house and its grounds. He has long admired, and drawn on, the textile designs of Enid Marx, and a pattern of his own seemed a fitting response. In the design, a swan on its river recalls the gilded swan sign on display, while sheep and cedars belong as much to the parkland as to the objects in the galleries. Fish swim through the water, bringing what Mark describes as “movement and flow to carry the eye along the gallery wall”. The pattern began as a linocut, which became the basis for a traditional roller-printed paper.

The wallpaper is now part of the St Jude’s collection of artist-designed papers and is available in River Blue. Further information about the British Folk Art Collection, and about planning a visit, can be found on Compton Verney’s website.

Installation photographs by Jamie Woodley.