Jupiter Artland: How does your garden sculpt?

Published on Thursday 7 May 2009 16:02

ONE OR TWO CENTURIES AGO, Robert and Nicky Wilson might have landscaped the grounds of their Jacobean home with a faux- ruined folly or ornamental ponds. Instead, at the end of a sweeping, newly constructed grass walkway, stands a steel tree of lushly hued orchid heads by sculptor Marc Quinn.

It looks as though it has sprouted there, a weed with virulent colours that leaves you expecting to smell it on the wind. Made from photographs of orchids, sprayed on to canvas and laminated on stainless steel, it is held in place by a 6m deep concrete plug.

The landscape of the Edinburgh art scene gets a lot more interesting from next weekend, when Jupiter Artland, the Wilsons' private collection of contemporary sculpture, spread over 80 acres of garden and woodland near Edinburgh Airport, opens to the public three days a week. Visitors can walk down grassy woodland paths to see major works by Quinn, Anish Kapoor, Anthony Gormley and Andy Goldsworthy, as well as Scottish names like Charles Jencks and the late Ian Hamilton Finlay. Even the cafe at Jupiter Artland is a piece of retro art: a Buck Rogers-style 1952 Silver Streak Clipper.

For contemporary art it adds another major attraction to Scotland's capital region, in an already formidable constellation that runs from the National Galleries or the Fruitmarket Gallery in the centre to Finlay's Borders garden, Little Sparta.

Tonight, at a private gathering to celebrate Jupiter Artland's unveiling, the artist Cornelia Parker will launch fireworks carrying a thumbful of powdered moon rock over Bonnington House.

Parker made a name for herself by swaddling Rodin's Kiss with string. In Nocturne, at Jupiter, she is set to simulate a moon rock landing on Earth, on the eve of the full moon. "It's about the mystical and magical aspects of comets and meteorites landing, and how they portend good luck or bad luck," says Nicky Wilson. "It is to underline that this is the day we say to people, you are welcome to come out and look at our sculptures, almost like a Chinese New Year."

Aside from Moondust, there are other bombshells. Later this year, the conceptual artist Peter Liversidge plans a summer snowstorm, complete with snow machine. But it is Life Mounds, said to be Jencks's largest work of land art in the world, that is simply jaw-dropping. Its eight stepped, turf-clad mounds straddle the drive into the estate like giant green gates.

If you have seen Jencks' award-winning Landform outside the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, think of it dwarfed by one that is taller, steeper, and several times the land area. Climb to the top of the highest mound, and the sheer scale takes your breath away. The work includes turf-covered curving steel crash-barriers at the side of the road, to prevent drivers running into the pond in astonishment.

The Wilsons moved into Bonnington House – a building that dates back to 1622 – from London with their children about eight years ago. She studied at Camberwell College of Arts, and worked as an art teacher and sculptor. He is chairman of Nelson's, the family owned homeopathic firm. Collecting Charles Jencks – or artists represented by London's White Cube – does not come cheap. A single work by Anish Kapoor has sold for more than 1 million at auction.

It was Jencks, author, architect and creator of the Garden of Cosmic Speculation in Dumfries, driving force behind the architect- designed Maggie's Centres for cancer patients, who set the ball rolling for Jupiter Artland. He was the first to come to Bonnington, and encouraged the Wilsons' ambitions. Life Mounds was to represent the six stages of mitosis, whereby cells recreate.

"In a sense we were always going to do the sculpture park, but his was the first piece," says Robert. "It was built literally by hand. Charles doesn't build his mounds, he designs them, and says here you are. You get a model to work from, because he doesn't do drawings, he says you can't, it's all by eye. He comes back month by month to check on progress."

The work was begun by a contractor building the mounds with 20-tonne excavators, and finished by hand over four or five years. With a team of five people working with them, the Wilsons were proud of turfing the steep-sided walls and paths of the mounds themselves. "We have learnt on the job. It's extremely weather dependent, particularly when you are in the mud stage," Robert says. "There were two very bad summers, one an absolute wash-out, which put things back. You would get landslides, slippage." Mound Eight, two weeks before the opening, was still bare earth.

Nicky Wilson began calling other sculptors. It was an "autobiographical" collection of people, she says. Camberwell friends worked for Kapoor and Gormley. Quinn had completed his notorious piece Self, better known as "Blood Head", made with nine pints of his frozen blood, while she was in London. Cornelia Park and sculptor Laura Ford were her teachers there; Ford's Weeping Girls, statues of six young girls in the throes of a tantrum, are one of the Jupiter artworks.

The Goldsworthy work is the other highlight. Under the slate roofs of his Stone House he has peeled back the earth to expose the bedrock, in what he calls a "geological window into the landscape". But the showstopper is Stone Coppice, for which Goldsworthy, aided by a gardener and mini-digger, hoisted 54 giant rocks, some weighing four tonnes or more, and suspended them in the trees, mostly at waist or chest height.

They resemble stones tossed from the air by a giant hand. Where some Goldsworthy works are washed down a river, or out to sea, in a matter of hours, this one will take decades to develop as the coppice wood is splayed, crushed, or grows up around the stone. Richard Ingleby, of Edinburgh's Ingleby Gallery, calls it the "best Goldsworthy piece I have seen in years".

"What I loved about him was he really was inspired by Bonnington," says Nicky Wilson. "He has probably been here more than anyone; he understood the space and then was reverential to it. He loves woods, he loves nature. This is elemental and dark, things are going to be destroyed in this, trees will collapse, things will happen."

The artists chose their own sites at Jupiter. Gormley's piece, Firmament, is a giant man, prostrate on his face, made of 1,770 steel bars welded together with 1,019 steel balls. It has a look that is half climbing-frame and half a falling slew of matchsticks, the head squashed into the ground, the arms and legs clear; the centre of the sculpture is a spidery, slightly unsatisfying tangle.

The Wilsons brought in 100,000 tonnes of top soil for the horizon Gormley wanted, overlooking the Forth Rail Bridge. He wasn't happy with the direction it faced; the sculpture was subsequently turned through 180 degrees, on a crane. "It's just more lyrical, the body relates to the land much better."

Kapoor's piece is Suck, a hole that shrinks into the ground, a version of which was seen at the Hayward Gallery in 1998. Kapoor came to see it in situ and decided, like Gormley, that the piece was not working. It was moved, and is now surrounded by an 18ft high iron cage. This will stop animals falling in, but the effect is to heighten a sense of threat and foreboding of the negative space behind the bars, from an artist who looks into the "fear of oblivion". "Children respond to it in the way that there must be a big animal down there," says Nicky.

It will take about one and a half hours to walk round Jupiter Artland the couple expect. In an effort to limit numbers, visitors are required to book a day and time for the visit in advance – morning, midday or afternoon. The Wilsons say they will have to learn by doing with visitors. They want to keep the place pristine, without the need for gravel or woodchip paths, stressing that it is a private collection open to the public. In their exhibition rooms on the estate, the Wilsons are waiting to hang an early work they bought from "concrete poet" Ian Hamilton Finlay. "We worship the groves and their very silences," reads the carved stone, in a garland of oak leaves. The sculpture also includes a commission arranged shortly before his death in 2006. His Temple of Apollo, with its stubby pillars, looks down on a classical statue, The Xth Muse. Nicky says: "He came here and said, under this beech tree, here is where I want my temple to be."

• Jupiter Artland is open from 15 May, 5 entry. For more information, visit www.jupiterartland.org