Somewhat stoned

Losing my Marbles

Preface:

Recondite

 

You know how, when under pressure, sometimes things go a bit blank?  Or, if asked a question out of the blue, you may say the first thing that comes into your head?  I would be useless on one of those TV quiz programmes.  I am pretty useless in pub quizzes.  [Come to think of it, you’re verging on the useless anyway.... Ed]

 

Anyway, when asked the other day what the word recondite meant, the first thing that came to mind was that it is a term to describe reconditioned dolomite, which is a sedimentary carbonate rock found particularly in the Dolomite Mountains of NE Italy.  The reconditioning occurs when waste rock from land slips is engineered for garden paving etc.  This may, or may not, be likened to the recent biotic synthetic experiment which claimed to have precipitated ordered dolomite when anoxygenic photosynthesis proceeded in the presence of manganese, or perhaps a still perplexing example of an organogenic origin [was] that of the reported formation of dolomite in the urinary bladder of a Dalmatian dog, possibly as the result of an illness or infection(Wikipedia).....  No?  [WTF?  Ed]

 

Well, as might perhaps already be apparent, this is not what recondite means...... as its origin lies in the past participle of the Latin verb recondere, which means to put away, or hide, hence the 1652 usage for deep, profound or abstruse (though in 1817 it was used to refer to obscure or little-known writers.... [Like you?  Ed])

 

Interface

So there we have it, which by a stumbling sidestep takes me to Palladian Houghton Hall, not far from my own palatial home in Norfolk, where (Houghton - not my home) the recondite British sculptor Stephen Cox is presenting -  across the park, gardens and interiors of the Hall - the largest and most comprehensive group of works the artist has ever shown. Spanning over 40 years, it includes work conceived and produced all over the world from India to Egypt, Italy and the UK.  [Does he work in reconditioned Dolomite?  Ed]

 

The exhibition, entitled Myth, consists of around 20 sculptures in marble and stone that have been placed in the landscape, while smaller works are installed in the State Rooms on the first floor of the house, where William Kent’s exuberant decorative scheme has hardly changed since it was created in the early 18th century.....

 

As the Houghton Hall website (https://www.houghtonhall.com/whats-on/stephen-cox-exhibition) has it, Stephen Cox is one of the most acclaimed British artists of his generation, best known for his monumental works in stone. His work is known worldwide with celebrated exhibitions include MOMA, New York and the National Gallery and Tate Britain, London. Using traditional techniques, he has carved marble, alabaster and porphyry, and was the first artist for many centuries to gain access to the Imperial Porphyry Quarries in the Eastern Mountains of Egypt. His works are in many private and public collections around the world, with government and corporate commissions in India and Egypt as well as in Britain. He was elected a Royal Academician in 2006.  

It is to my chagrin (or perhaps just due to my ignorance?) that I regret never having heard of him heretofore.....

 

The grounds of Houghton Hall are in themselves something of a work of art – a whole village was relocated to improve the views – with ancient trees and designed avenues populated by white fallow deer (originally bred by the 5th Marquess of Cholmondeley in the late 19th century, these deer, once considered a Victorian indulgence, now contribute significantly to the park's ecosystem). 

Last year, the misty mornings were the setting for one hundred life-size three-dimensional rusty selfies of Anthony Gormley.  

Now the tone is more recondite [Don’t you mean erudite?  Ed] with, among other pieces, sculptures of eleven female figures (Yoginis – 2000-2010), human forms with animal heads, derived from a tantric cult, carved out of black Indian stone and set in an inward-facing circle. 

 

Yoginis 2000-2010
Charnockite (basalt) 
each sculpture is approximately 200 cm x 55 cm x 40 cm

 

Lord Cholmondeley, owner of Houghton Hall, explains why these sculptures work so well in this setting. The title of Stephen Cox’s exhibition at Houghton seems particularly fitting as so much of his work as an artist references the mythology and religions of ancient civilisations – especially Egypt and the Indian subcontinent – with their allegorical fables and anthropomorphic deities.

 

An alchemy of enrichment seems to have occurred between Cox’s sculptures and William Kent’s sumptuous interiors, with their variegated marble tables and entablature, a subtle connection across the centuries that both Kent and his patron, Sir Robert Walpole, would surely have approved of.

 

A visit to Houghton Hall at any time is a treat. The park stretches out, a curated expanse of Norfolk at its best, with the intricate walled garden to one side and a wooded area to the other, which is home to some of the permanent exhibits of the Houghton art collection – Scottish artist Anya Gallaccio’s wonderful Sybil Hedge which is based on the signature of the Marquis Cholmondeley’s grandmother, Sybil Sassoon.  This is a three-metre-tall copper-beech hedge planted in lines mirroring Sybil's signature.  And then across the way is (82-year-old American artist) James Turrell’s Skyspace: Seldom Seen, 

one of many constructions he has created across the world designed as places of contemplative thought:  You are looking at you looking. What is important to me [Turrell] is to create an experience of wordless thought....

I like that:  wordless thought - so much better than thoughtless words....

 

And then some way from the house in the main avenue is 80 year old Bristolian Turner Prize winning Sir Richard Long’s Full Moon Circle. 

There’s enough art here to make you fall headlong into the Ha Ha.....

 

Anyway we are here for Stephen Cox and his sculptures, and we are not disappointed.  Beginning in the appropriately named Stone Hall there are two large pieces sculpted from Imperial Porphyry, the hardest stone in the world.  One of these, Dreadnought: Problems of History, Search for the Hidden Stone, 

Dreadnought:
Problems of History, the Search for the Hidden Stone,
2003 - ongoing

has rough carving carried out by Roman workers.  The other piece, Chrysalis, a monolith amongst monoliths, was fashioned by Cox at his studio in Egypt, employing carvers from Luxor and Aswan.

Chrysalis, 1989–91

Porphyry 92 cm x 285 cm x 100 cm

Brecciated Imperial porphyry, 1 m x 2.7 m x 0.85 m

Neatly tucked away amongst the opulence of the state rooms of Houghton there are other pieces by Cox, including a small model of St Lawrence’s gridiron in the Library, and alabaster and other stone figures and objects perching on the tables and desks around the rooms.

Cycladic Gemini with Altar, 2018

Hand-carved alabaster with gold leaf details 

set on an alabaster base

53cm x 50cm x 25.5cm

Lancia Figures

Egyptian Alabaster 2009

 

In the park there are great sarcophagi, or interior spaces, their walls and roofs sawn from massive boulders and then polished to reflecting surfaces.  These impressive boxes stand empty, their presence the result of some of the most ingenious flat-packing of recent times.....

Yatra represents simple outrigger fishing boats tossed on a granite sea, as Cox witnessed at Mahabalipuram on the south-east coast of India.  I visited Mahabalipuram many years ago, and although I did not notice granite columns sticking out of the sandy beach, I can vouch for the verisimilitude of the crafts atop the waves.....

Granite Catamarans on a Granite Wave, 1993-4

Black and white Indian granite ( dolerite/basalt and diorite )

350 x 1400 x 700 cm

and there are various sculpted pieces of rock - some single pieces, but many designed as twins hewn from the same piece of stone, exquisitely polished on one face, but rough and untouched on the other:

Gemini III , 2012 - 2016

Carved Egyptian breccia

then we find eleven intriguing feminine figures facing each other in a glade in the woods.  These are the Yoginis, as seen above, fashioned to represent the mythical merging of human and animal characteristics, each one a different creature, but harmonious in the circle.

 

Postscript

At the end of the day, we are left wondering.  The overall impression (which is confirmed by looking through Cox’s catalogue) is of an enormous amount of work, tons of stone, colossal imagination, recondite (?) research and a feeling for time and space that drives lesser concerns away.  We don’t ask what does this mean?  We admire.  We wonder.  Then we wander off, somehow changed by the experience.  Somehow richer for the stimuli.....  

Am I mything something?  I don’t believe so.

 

But, from a forest of stones, the geology of art confuses me.  Is alabaster stone? Has recondite been reconditioned? Do you make stone anchors from anchorite? Is dynamite a stone that explodes? Is cordite what you make stone trousers from? Is hermaphrodite a rare self-fertilising stone? Can you sculpt quickly with expedite? Is endite the last stone you will ever see?

 

Am I losing my marbles?

[Of course all this is based on the premise that the suffix -ite indicates some lapidary feature (though rhyolite, bauxite and trachite are examples of rocks ending in -ite, so am I on dodgy ground?) whereas perhaps -ith might be more convincing..... 

In which case does Mith (or rather Myth) stand for one thousand stones?] 

Arrest my case…..  [Time to call it a day.  Ed]

 

Thank you, Stephen Cox.  Thank you, David Cholmondeley.  Thank you my friend for taking me.

 

I now need to lie on the beach and watch the green flash as the liquid sun melds into the night.

 

Epilogue

....the work of the artist in all its aspects is, of its nature, individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled. The artist walks where the breath of the spirit blows him. He cannot be told his direction; he does not know it himself. But he leads the rest of us into fresh pastures and teaches us to love and to enjoy what we often begin by rejecting, enlarging our sensibility and purifying our instincts.

John Maynard Keynes

First Chairman of The Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) (Which became the Arts Council)

The Listener - 1945

Stephen Cox: Myth
Houghton Hall, King’s Lynn, Norfolk PE31 6UE
Until Sunday 28 September 2025

Back to Nature

Far from the madding crowd....

Sunrise over the North Sea, streaming across the extraordinary poppy fields that this year have coated north Norfolk in waving fields of blood.  

A little while before sun rise I just caught the moon going down, a tiny bright pinprick in the sky:

And then here comes the sun, and I say, "It's alright...."

It all happens so fast.  Daylight like a rising flash, a lightning, I find it all hard to believe, so I ask a passing skylark to take my pic from above:

And then he takes a speckled stutter of spatters without me (can you trust anyone these days?):

And that was last week. 

Yes, life is racing by.  Only a few weeks ago the cowslips were like a delicately quilted coverlet spread across the countryside.  

 

Then they gradually faded, seeping into beige and pale lemony green.  And then we had the poppies, fields and fields of them, filling the air with a dozy haze in the evening air while we walked.

Today I walk from my home to the north coast, some eight and half miles along lanes and footpaths, and the poppies are pale and fringed with age, their petals bruised with the flapping winds we have had in the last few days.....

And now they are being succeeded, by hawkweeds, or hawkbits, or common cat's-ears (please excuse my inexactitude; life is too short....)

So anyway.  I've been in the city.  I've had some slightly startling speedy heartbeats, and I am glad to be back in the fresh air, walking comfortably above the ground, fluttered by butterflies:

Two ringlets exchanging greetings

I am just off the Peddars' Way, only sixteen miles north of Castle Acre,

The landscape tells human stories.  Here a dry cereal crop leads you down to a red stone farm which lies just by the old railway line from Hunstanton to Fakenham.....

Here a shady oak frames a bucolic fold of hills with, though you cannot see it, a red kite trawling for worms.....

Then we have the hedgerows and wildflowers, exchanging their bodily fluids with the insects of the air to enable life, of all sorts, to go on.  Without this, you should know, we are all doomed....  Insect sex is everything we need....

A white-tailed bumblebee on knapweed

A six-spot Burnet moth on Knapweed

A six-spot Burnet moth on field scabious

A small white butterfly on bramble flowers

John Clare wrote:

Though simple to some I delight in the sight

Of such objects that bring unto me

A picture of picturesque joy and delight

Where beauty and harmony be

Oh I love at my heart to be strolling along

Oer the heath a new impulse to find

While I hum to the wind in a ballad or song

Some fancy that starts in the mind

All seems so delightful and bring to the mind

Such quiet and beautiful joys

That the mind when its weary like hermits may find

A retreat from earths folly and noise

The Heath

John Clare

I walk on.  Every day is new.  The shift from yellow to red to brown and so on is all part of the rich weft of colour that our world, when undisturbed, offers to the wanderer.  Seasonal.  Transitional. Always changing; always developing.  I am just perplexed by the rapidity of these changes.  

Don't read anything into these musings.  I breast the hill leading down to the coast and see,  distantly but clearly, Lincolnshire to one side, and a wind farm to the other.  As far as I can see there is life.  And life only.  

The foreground is filled with asparagus ferns, from the young plants that need to mature before they are harvested.  This is where I live, now.  This is beautiful.  I am happy to share it with you.....

Time flies by

In the blink of an eye

When you get paid for having too much fun

Kicking out the foot lights

Living the night life

Like tomorrow ain't never going to come

Wouldn't change much of nothing

About this road we've been running

For of wild times, wild women, and a song

But we would've taken much better care of ourselves

If we would have known we would live this long

Live This Long

Willie Nelson 

Merle Haggard

Amazing Grayson.....

Delusions. Of Grandeur?

Marlon Brando as Regulator Robert E Lee Clayton
in Arthur Penn's The Missouri Breaks

Q. When is a National Treasure not a National Treasure?

A. When it doesn't know who it is.

Grayson Perry as Shirley Smith
in Madge Gill's The Wallace Collection

The dress Grayson Perry designed for Marlon Brando
[Are you sure?  Ed]

Amazing Grayson, How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

And the first thing I see, on regaining my sight, are London rooftops, which conceal the life within.  Layer upon layer of obscurity, through which I attempt to spy something relevant.  

And so, in search of reason, we attend Her Madge's show in the underworld of the Wallace Collection, within the dusty confines of Hertford House.  Here she is. Lying in wait.....

The exhibition, on the occasion of Grayson's 65th birthday [Only a year or so to the Bus Pass. Ed], is one masked by a plurality of personae, where Ms Perrin [Shome mishtake? Ed], sorry, Grayson Perón. [Shtill not right. Ed] OK. Where Grayson shelters under a plurality of alter egos, starting with Shirley Smith, an outsider artist who believes herself to be The Honourable Millicent Wallace, rightful heir to Hertford House and its collection, including the Armoury.

Gun for shooting into the past

I have to declare something of my ignorance here. Apart from hearing that he won the Turner Prize in 2003, catching snatches of Perry's 2013 Reith Lectures, seeing some knitted bicycles and floral pots in the Arnolfini in Bristol, learning that in 2014 he was elected to the Royal Academy of Art, and that in 2019 he was appointed a trustee of the British Museum, I have not been a Grayson Perry groupie. But he is an articulate, and skilful creator and his ideas are considerable. Initially a potter,

What a Wonderful World - Glazed ceramic
(When I first came to London I was poor.  Forty-two years later, as a successful artist, I am fairly rich.  But I never take it for granted.....  Try being poor and you soon find out how all-consuming anxiety about money can become - Grayson Perry)

He has mastered many materials, such as textiles,

I Know Who I Am 
Cotton fabric and embroidery appliqué bedspread
(I imagine Shirley making this bedspread as a talismanic protection for her body and her sense of identity - Grayson Perry)

AI designed tapestries:

Modern, Beautiful and Good
(I imagined this tapestry as a seductive logo-wall, in front of which virtue-signalling aesthetes could advertise their good taste and their munificence - Grayson Perry)

Multi-media productions:

Wall paper:

Furniture:

The Great Beauty - Oak, brass and ceramic
(A shrine to friendship - No one knows what Shirley actually kept inside the cabinet, for it was found empty upon her death - Grayson Perry)

And various styles of portraiture:

The Honourable Millicent Wallace - Woodblock print
(This portrait is how Shirley Smith saw herself; it is a mirror to her self-soothing delusion.  Millicent is the essence of regal elegance.  She is desirable, stylish, rich, confident and a crack shot - Grayson Perry)

Magical Thinking
('Magical thinking' is when we believe our thoughts and feelings can have an effect on the world - Grayson Perry)

This show is dazzling, and is great fun. It has had some interesting reviews, not all of them five star. The Week UK reported thus in April: The trouble is that Perry's heart just isn't in it, said Alastair Sooke in The Telegraph [Perhaps they would?  Ed]. Indeed, "his irritation with the project is palpable": in his captions, he expresses his dislike for the Wallace and its contents, even its West End location; he describes an intentionally crude new pot he has made for the show as "a grumpy outburst in pottery form", its rough edges hewn in response to the museum's trove of exquisite 18th century Sèvres porcelain. "OK, so he hates French rococo style – but, given that this is a speciality of the Wallace Collection, why take this exhibition on?" Perry's teasing provocations are usually offset by his "famous wit", but here he comes across as stroppy.....

I am not at all sure that I agree, but that is my dilemma.  In his first Reith Lecture, under the title Playing to the Gallery, Grayson offered a mathematical formula for art in the twenty-first century:  What you do is you get a half-decent, non-offensive kind of idea, and then you times it by the number of studio assistants, then you divide it with an ambitious art dealer and that equals the number of oligarchs and hedge-fund managers in the world.....

There is an underlying cynicism in this, but perhaps it should not be disregarded. Grayson also once said: If you want to be successful in the art world you've got to look to the art world; you don't make it for the bloke next door and then hope the art world is going to look at it. That's one of the big mistakes people make.  I think that Duccio probably knew that.  And isn't that what drove Van Gogh to despair?

A Tree in a Landscape - Etching
(The tree stands in a landscape of potential causes.  We all exhibit some traits that could be pathologised - Grayson Perry)

'Twas Grayson that taught my heart to fear,

And Grayson my fears relieved.

How precious did that Grayson appear

The hour I first believed.

It is hot.  London is not cool, though across the royal parks the shade makes us welcome.  I am grateful to Grayson for his interaction, for his interest in offering tools to understand and appreciate art.  Autobiography is a narrative, I think to myself, as I try to understand my fears.

And then, returning from cross town perambulations, I am driven to quench my thirst in the Mercato Metropolitano, a cultural and foodie hub in the deconsecrated church of St Mark’s, a Grade 1-listed building on North Audley Street.

It is cross-dressing in stone, an expression of the ongoing confusion of human endeavour.  Built as a temple to thought and faith, it is now an office for the pursuit of epicureanism  - but no matter: we are used to multiple personalities. 

And then, sated, it is time to follow the sun down through the quiet streets,

Past the Phantom of Liberty (remember the wallpaper?) where - according to Luis Buñuel - chance governs all things......

To stand with eager devotees to hear Pallas Athena [You mean Evita? Ed] intone her heartfelt imprecation to the people of her country as she faced her untimely death [Remember that we need not cry because (a) Evita got everything out of life she dreamed of, and (b) Argentina should cry for itself...... Ed]

Rachel Zegler as Eva Perón (Grayson's sister?)
on the balcony of the London Palladium
{Avenida 9 de Julio}

So many duplicates.  So much duplicity.  The tenuous links between film and art, between life and imagination.  Which is real?  Which is true?  It is all part of the game.  That sparkling game that is life.....

Oxford Street, early

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don't resist them - that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Lao Tzu