Claire Bown: Hello and welcome to the Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.
I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience
and bring art objects and ideas to life.
So let's dive into this week's show.
Hello, and welcome to a new episode of The Art Engager.
I'm Claire Bown, and today I'm chatting with Geraldine Collinge, Chief Executive
at Compton Verney, a unique art space in a park located in Warwickshire in the UK.
But before we dive in, a quick word about my book, The Art Engager Reimagining
Guided Experiences in Museums.
Now, a huge thank you to everyone who's supported the book since its release.
I'm so grateful for your enthusiasm and your feedback,
and I'd also love your support.
So please consider leaving a review on Amazon or sharing what you like
about the book on social media.
And if you are reading it with a book club, do get in touch.
I'd be happy to offer a free Q&A session for your group.
Now let me introduce today's guest.
Geraldine Collinge brings a wealth of experience in the arts,
including 12 years as director at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
She now leads Compton Verney, an extraordinary cultural organization set in
the rural heart of England, just south of Warwickshire and near Stratford upon Avon.
For listeners unfamiliar with Compton Verney, it's a place that defies easy
categorization, part art gallery, part historic house, part landscape
garden, and 100% dedicated to creating meaningful encounters with art and nature.
It's housed in a historic Robert Adam mansion, surrounded by 120 acres of
Capability Brown designed landscape.
So founded by Sir Peter Moores just over 20 years ago, Compton Verney
has transformed from a ruined stately home into a vibrant, contemporary
art space with six distinctive collections ranging from ancient
Chinese bronzes to British folk art.
What makes it really special is its playful accessible approach, which
welcomes everyone into the world of art.
So if you're curious about how cultural spaces can become more accessible,
engaging, and meaningful for diverse audiences, this conversation is for you.
Compton Verney is really re-imagining art engagement by putting values
like inclusivity, boldness, and fun at the heart of everything they do.
So in today's episode, Geraldine shares how Compton Vern's core
values really guide their work.
We talk about their play first approach, their multisensory
exhibitions that have doubled visitor numbers and how they're creating deep
connections between art and nature.
This conversation is full of inspiring insights into what it takes to create
genuinely engaging cultural spaces.
Enjoy.
Hi Geraldine, and welcome to the Art Engager Podcast.
Geraldine Collinge: Hi.
Hi.
It's great to be here.
Thanks for having me.
Claire Bown: You're very, very welcome.
So could you tell our listeners a little bit about who you are and what you do?
I'm
Geraldine Collinge: Geraldine Collinge and I've got the pleasure of being
Chief Executive at Compton Verney.
So before Compton Verney, I'd been at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford,
which is just down the road from here.
And I'd been there for over 10 years and was thinking about, what next.
And I saw the job advertised at Compton Verney.
In fact, I heard that the job was gonna be coming up at Compton Verney
and thought, That's the job for me.
I already loved Compton Verney.
I was a member, had even collaborated on an exhibition about Shakespeare.
It felt absolutely the right move for me and I was really delighted
that, yeah, through a proper process, was lucky enough to be offered the
job about two and a half years ago.
Claire Bown: Excellent.
You are in Warwickshire, which for our listeners who are not from the UK, we
have listeners all around the world.
Warwickshire is a county in the center in the Midlands of England.
Could you tell us a little bit about Compton Verney and what makes it special?
Geraldine Collinge: So Compton Verney is an art space in a park, and the park is
120 acres of Capability Brown landscape.
And we've also got a Robert Adam House on the landscape.
So it is a kind of really beautiful historic location, but
then with contemporary activity.
So we're a young organization in a historic place.
We connect people with art, nature, and creativity.
And Compton Verney is one of those really kind of extraordinary places.
It's playful, it is surprising.
Makes for a really brilliant day out.
And like you say, we're right in the middle of the country, so we're at
the south of Warwickshire, nearly in Oxfordshire, like I said, near Stratford
upon Avon, near Leamington Coventry.
So we've got this rural location that is completely idyllic, but actually
also quite near urban environment.
You know, it's a pretty special place
Claire Bown: and it's not always been open to the public, has it?
Last year it was your 20th anniversary, is that right?
Geraldine Collinge: That's completely right.
So we've got quite an unusual background in that we were set up by Sir Peter
Moores, who was part of the family that owned a retail group, Littlewoods,
which some people might remember.
And his family also invented something called the Pools, which is where
people used to bet on what the scores were gonna be in football matches.
So Sir Peter Moores was the son of this fortune and he inherited a fortune and
he started to work in the business.
And we are told that his father said, 'oh, you know, you are okay at
business, but have you thought about doing anything else?' So I think his
interests were much more in the arts.
And he loved opera and he loved visual art, and he had a vision to create an
art gallery in the middle of the country that would be accessible to people.
So one of his strap lines was open doors, open minds, and he discovered
Compton Verney when it was a ruin.
It had been a stately home for landed gentry and then it had been sold off.
So different people had lived here over time.
But it really was a ruin.
He bought it and then he invested millions and millions of pounds into
turning it into a contemporary art space.
So he built a new wing that is a real state of the art, contemporary
gallery space created a restaurant space, toilets, all the immunities that
you need to run a public venue now.
And he opened it in two stages and the full opening was, yeah,
it was 20 years ago last year, so 21 years ago, almost to the day.
And another brilliant thing that he did is that he acquired
collections to go into the gallery.
So it isn't that, it's his things that were here.
And some people say to me, oh, did Peter Moores live here?
Or so?
No, he never lived here.
He always thought about it, he was making it a public space.
So the collections that we've got on show are things that he thought
people would be interested in.
And all the collections were selected because they weren't collections that
were in other people's collections.
So like the National Gallery or other main museums around the country.
So it's kinda like all the collections are very, very specific and quite niche.
So together we've got these six incredibly specific, exciting collections.
So from ancient Shang, Ty, Chinese bronzes to folk art, to pub signs and
really, eclectic mix of collections.
And then, two different exhibition spaces with different changing
temporary exhibitions and also, things in the grounds.
So increasingly, we've done more events and activities, so we have things like
something called 'Pot Fest' coming up in May, where there's loads of people selling
their incredible pottery all around the grounds, loads of activities for families.
One of our big growing audiences has been a family audience, so activities
in the school holidays, but also activities for very early years, young
people in the week, who perhaps wouldn't otherwise go to a cultural space.
But trying to give people access to culture from an early stage.
Claire Bown: And an absolutely fascinating history to the place.
And it could say quite a unique place as well with the kind of unique
blend of collections that you've got, the history that you've got.
But I think that your work, your values carry on the work of Sir Peter Moores,
who set up and started Compton Verney.
So I think you're carrying on those values around openness, accessibility.
So could you talk a little bit about the values at Compton Verney?
Geraldine Collinge: Yeah, so I suppose maybe I'd start even by saying like, my
own values are about access to culture.
I believe passionately that everybody should have access
to culture and creativity.
That is something that we can all enjoy.
And that's shaped my career and the jobs that I've done.
So I've worked in a variety of different organizations and
I've done lots of different creative roles through my career.
But generally they've been about, how we can open things up and enable access
to different forms of creativity.
So I've worked in spoken word for quite a long time, really thinking about
how more people engage with poetry.
More people have access to something that often people would
say, oh, poetry's not for me.
Then you have, being at the Royal Shakespeare Company as not
particularly a Shakespeare expert, but someone who could enable people
to find ways into Shakespeare and, so yeah, I famously created
Montague's v Capulet's table football.
I definitely want people to be able to engage with things and I think
that's super important is part of the thing we should all have access to.
So I
approach Compton with that in mind.
And thinking about what are the values of Compton Verney and our
values as we currently articulate them are that we're collaborative,
sustainable, bold, inclusive, and fun.
And it's one of the very early projects that I did here and almost used it
as a way to kind of get to know the organization, get to know the people
here, was to start to think about what might our values be going forward.
We had values, et cetera already, but, how could we think about A small number
of values that were really memorable, that people could really get behind
that meant something to everybody.
And I also really believe that I want everybody to be able to understand
the values and everybody to feel like they can see them in their work.
And we are a complex organization.
We've got people doing lots of different functions here.
As you can imagine, you might be working in finance, you might be
working in the restaurant, you might be working in the landscape.
Not lots of people are doing lots of different kinds of jobs it was really
important to have the conversations around values to get us to think about yeah how
can everybody say, 'oh yeah, I can see how I do that in my day-to-day work'.
So yeah we did it as quite a large project.
In that, when you are new somewhere and you're full of enthusiasm and
you really want to set up and to take people with you on that journey.
Thought about it as well as alongside updating our mission,
our vision, and our values.
So yeah, really thought about those.
I mainly worked internally with staff on them, so with staff and volunteers,
and then with our board as well to think about what the values were.
And then since then, I. Like I say, I've, we touched on them again last
,year when we were developing our new strategy and I did a bit more work
externally had sensing conversations.
I dunno if you know someone called Otto Scharmer.
And, as part of his theory, he talks a lot about having sensing conversations and
enables you to almost feel a new future.
And he thinks about data really broadly.
So data through, yeah, what you observe.
And his big strap line is about observing, 'observe, observe, observe',
and using all the data that you gather.
How we are relating to each other in this conversation is data.
That is, informing my opinion about who you are, how we are engaging,
so he's really helps you to think about, particularly as kind of
visual organizations, what's, we need to take everything that we
see as part of a communication.
So yeah, using that theory was a really important tool as part
of our strategy development.
Claire Bown: Super interesting.
I will look it up as those words, observe, observe, observe write up
my street, and probably a lot of the listeners to this podcast as well.
We talked off air a little bit about values being more than just a piece
of paper that you stick to the wall.
So how do you ensure that these values actually guide the work at Compton Verney
Geraldine Collinge: Yeah, I think because some of them are kind of so
close to my heart, so we immediately started doing some things that
were instilled by those values.
And offline, you asked me a brilliant question about my values and about
Compton Verney values, and that was like really helpful to reflect on
in terms of like, what things are my values as well as Compton Bernie's
values and where do those converge and where might they be slightly different?
So it made me think about some of the things that I arrived thinking
about, like, how is Compton Verney the birthright of local people?
We've got a paywall, so that's quite complicated to
articulate it as a birthright.
But you know, we started thinking about creating community passes
that give a 97% discount for some of the groups that we work with.
So straight away you are enabling access to something that might
have been perceived as a barrier.
And one of the things that we did last year is that as part of the 20th birthday,
we created a two pound pass for people on pension credit and income credit.
And we sold 850 of those over the year.. Actually being able to say, yes, there
are ways of making sure that we are giving people access to Compton Verne.
That it isn't elitist and thinking about yeah, what, how we might present ourselves
and what we need to do to channel that.
So I suppose some of it is through doing and through making some of those changes.
And other things are, really practical things like in our annual reviews.
So I've just had my annual review with the chair.
We all start those by thinking about really specific examples
of how we've met our values.
So what are the things that we actually did that were
tangible demonstration of value.
Being able to do that all the way through the organization's,
I think is really important.
I personally would use them as a guide or a challenge.
If you're trying to make a decision or you're in a dilemma or a tricky
position, then thinking, okay, how can our values help us with this?
What do they tell us to do?
And, particularly at the moment, things aren't easy in the world, are they?
If you are making a decision where you might think, oh, this is gonna compromise
our values... Are we prepared to do that?
What does that mean?
So being really conscious, I suppose, about our decision making.
And I talked a bit about our strategy and that absolutely at the heart
of our strategy going forward.
So that enables us to live them because then we're saying, yeah,
these are the changes we're gonna make, these are the new initiatives.
And thinking about where those values might get to.
Sustainability is a really important value for us, environmentally, financially,
in all ways thinking about sustainability.
But, I really want to move beyond sustainability to
thinking about regeneration.
A lot of our strategy is thinking about a regenerative future.
So what do we need to do to get there and that all of our values will help
us to get to a regenerative future.
And of course, they're on the wall.
I can see them next to me.
You know those old fashioned ways that they're around us as well.
Claire Bown: Yeah.
Always good to to think about your values in that way as well as, that kind of
compass that you can come back to mm-hmm.
Whenever you need to.
And particularly in, in times like we are in, at the present time as
well, more challenging situations come up, you know, how do we think about
any of those challenging situations?
Are they in line with our values or do we have to step outside
our values in order to cope with the things that are thrown us?
Geraldine Collinge: Mm-hmm.
I'm just, I actually, I was just gonna say, I remember when John Prescott
died, people quoted him saying, 'changing times, enduring values'.
I thought that was such a, yeah.
A brilliant quote.
So I've been thinking about that particularly in very
changing times at the moment.
Claire Bown: Absolutely.
Absolutely.
I'm really intrigued by one of your values.
Well, I think they're all super interesting.
I like the use of bold in there as well, but fun as a core value.
Mm-hmm.
So this is not something if you look at.
I dunno, the major museum and heritage sites around the world,
but you probably wouldn't see the word fun come up in value.
So this is one of your core values.
And I think also in a sector that takes itself quite seriously a lot of the time
and can feel intimidating to some, we have those barriers to entry that we're
often talking about on the podcast.
So how does fun play into your work and how does it change
the way people engage with your collections and your exhibitions?
Geraldine Collinge: I want it to be a value for everybody.
We spend a lot of our lives at work, and yes, it can be serious.
There are big decisions to make, but I would hope that we can do
that within a context that is fun and enjoyable and pleasurable.
I'm not playing practical jokes all the time, or, but hopefully is a
place where people enjoy spending time and want to spend time.
And I think as a recruiter and an employer, it's also important to think
about, how you are attracting people.
Like I say, we spend a lot of our times in the workplace.
We also work a lot with volunteers and our board members, our chair was at a staff
and volunteers meeting the other day and, she explaining her role to people and have
people to understand, how a board works.
And she said, you know, ' I don't get paid.
I do it for the love'.
And I thought that was such a nice way of expressing it as well.
And, our board, our chair, particularly our volunteers, are
very generous with their time.
And, I want to respect them, but also for them to get.
Pleasure, fun from the experience as well as hopefully lots of other things.
You know, it is not to undercut the challenge of the endeavor, but it
is to say, yeah, let's make sure we get our balances right here.
Let's think about how we do that.
And it is an incredible place and it is a place where lots
of people have a lot of fun.
So in the ways that you might imagine, there've been school groups
here today who've been, running around the site, playing outside.
It's a beautiful day.
They were all drawing portraits earlier, so watching that, sense of fun and
engagement and joy but then also really thinking about, okay, well, what can we
do that maybe takes that a bit further?
Like you say, how might people engage with the collections and the exhibitions?
One of the collection re-displays that for me really embodies that
value is our Naples collection.
So our Naples collection, I should say, is a collection of, predominantly
oil paintings, but not just oil paintings from the Naples region.
Naples was one of Peter Moore's absolute passions.
Somewhere he spent a lot of time.
A lot of the paintings are of people on the grand tour or the kinds of things
that they would've seen on the grand tour.
We've got great big paintings of volcanoes, we've got paintings of
villas with people playing music, quite a lot of religious paintings.
And a few years ago we took the time to re-display that collection.
We painted the rooms a very vibrant blue color.
We hung the paintings at a lower level and the interpretation
at a lower level as well.
Straight away you are engaging with those artworks on a much more individual basis.
And yeah, particularly if you are a smaller person or perhaps
you're a wheelchair user, you're not looking up at the paintings.
And also then sort through the five senses about those paintings.
And specifically incorporating smell, sound, touch into the gallery.
And there's an amazing volcano inspired play table as well that sits
at the heart of one of the galleries.
Visitor numbers have doubled since we did that re-display, doubled to that
collection, and I know when I bring visitors anyone, to be honest, to the
galleries, it's generally where I start.
It's really brought those paintings to life, brought that collection to life.
You can play, there's a painting of someone holding a guitar and
you can play and with a piano and you can play the tarantella and
it plays out loud in the space.
So straight away disrupts, so it is not shush, we're here to look at
these beautiful, important paintings.
Yes.
But also, you suddenly see them differently.
So in another painting, you suddenly notice the musicians sitting along the
wall by the castle, or you, if you think about touch when there's a painting of
Jesus and the Virgin Mary, and someone's reaching towards his wound and suddenly
you see the poignancy of that touch.
And another thing we were able to do as part of that re-display is
we commissioned some new work and there's a piece by, and we work with
unlimited, who are an organization that specifically works with disabled artists.
And we work with someone called Aaron McPeake, who's a blind artist
and he does quite a lot of work with Bells and thinking about sound.
And he produced these three bells that are surrounded with volcanic rock
and visitors are encouraged to touch them, and they clang together and
they make this beautiful bell sound.
That's one of the first things you see when you go into the gallery spaces.
I know when the gallery's waking up in the morning, you hear the clang
of the bells, so you know, yeah.
You know that people are in there.
And thinking about smell.
So there's beautiful little scents dispensers next to some of the paintings.
If you are unlucky, you get a whiff of sulfur next to the so volcano
paintings, or you might get beautiful lemons and oranges and think about
difference of Italian smells, but yeah, it's really revolutionized the space.
Young people go in pulling their parent grandparent, carer's hand,
they're leading the journey, they want to go in and explore.
So art isn't, it isn't feeling intimidating, they're wanting
to engage underneath it.
Reminded me, we've got a Louise Bourgeois spider here at the moment and I was going
for a walk at lunchtime the other day.
And there was a young girl, I guess three, four-ish walking up the drive with
a, an older person and then she said, I'm just going to run under the spider.
And, just that like setting off and it's like, wow, you know, it's Louise Bourgeois
Spider and she's off to run underneath it.
We want people, young people to experience the art, to engage with it,
to feel like they can be artists, so to try and get rid of some of those
intimidating, serious barriers whilst, at the same time still asking serious
questions, still interrogating, it is not, we're not a bouncy castle, you
know, we are still asking questions.
We are still wanting to engage people and I think getting that getting that balance
right so that we've got that mix of energy challenge, joy, we're finding a way of
keeping those things in a healthy tension.
But yeah, it's really brilliant to see how it's changing, how
people can engage with art.
Claire Bown: I love it.
And it seems to me leading on from that there's play at the center here.
There's a really playful approach.
So can you tell us more about this kind of philosophy around play as
a way to engage people with art?
Geraldine Collinge: Yeah, so the team have developed a play strategy
and take a play first approach.
We've got a playground with all the traditional things you'd expect in
a playground next to the car park.
And of course, playgrounds are put next to car park.
So you know, they don't disturb the art and, leave the screaming
children down there and, you know, drop 'em off and then, go away again.
Whereas we've really thought about how do we take play across the whole site?
How do we.
How do we think about play for everybody?
Not, I know I've spoken a fair bit about play for children, but we want
everybody to engage in different ways with art and with creativity and
in fact with the landscape as well.
So to think playfully.
So yeah, so it's about inside and outside.
It's about young and old we've worked with a few artists to help us with that.
So with Woodland Tribe, who I'm sure you and lots of your listeners know who
do brilliant, play and creativity that is allowing people to do things that
may be, other people might say, oh, don't do that, or You can't do that.
Obviously everything is risk assessed and it is safe, but, really letting
people experiment and try things out.
Also quite a lot of work with there's an artist called Matt Shaw, and Sarah Hunt.
So they do a lot of work that's just like building things, creating things.
We've got an exhibition of drawings for the, from the Sir John Soane Museum at the
moment, and at the end of the exhibition there's cardboard and we are encouraging
people to make their own structures.
The exhibition is showing some structures that are kind of amazing,
you know, thinking about putting the Taj Mahal inside the pyramid at Giza.
For example, or, St Paul's (Cathedral) inside another building or what
happens if you merge this and this?
But you know, through those we can get people to think about
how they want to be playful.
We've got a lot of kind of Lego type building things here at the moment, and
it definitely is not just the children that are there for hours building things.
You know, everybody is enjoying exploring their own creativity and thinking.
Having the pleasure of making.
And also another important element is lots of loose form play.
Lots of open-ended play, so it doesn't necessarily have a
kind of really strict outcome.
But we've got some wooden blocks that, are there for people to play on in
the ground and people are encouraged to make whatever forms they want to
make and to use their imaginations.
And then the blue blocks sit in our Adam Hall, which is one of the few remaining
Robert Adam features of the building.
It's right at the heart of the building.
Surrounded by the collection spaces and it will be full of young people playing
with these big blue blocks, you know?
And that makes me very happy.
Claire Bown: So do you find that adults being slightly more reticent towards play
and being playful, we kind of learn not to be playful as we get older in life.
Do you find you have to work harder to get adults to engage as well?
Geraldine Collinge: Yeah, we're not gonna make everybody be playful.
And there are people who want to come and see the art and, have some
food and do their day in the way that they want to do their day.
I'm not going to insist that everybody must be playful.
But for those that want to engage.
It absolutely is there for them to do that.
But also, some of the artwork is playful.
I think two pieces particularly that are in the sculpture park that we've got.
So we've got a Sarah Lucas piece called Perceval, which
is a beautiful old shire horse.
With a cart with two oversized marrows on the back of it.
It's a huge piece that sits at the edge of our south lawn.
In a moment it'll be totally surrounded by wild flowers, which is really beautiful,
and it's a really playful piece.
You would not expect to see an oversized, shire horse sitting in a landscape.
And near to that, we've also, got a sculpture by an artist
called Nicolas Deshayes.
And his sculpture is in a fountain.
And the fountain is lots of intestines.
And so you see the water kind of spurting from these kind of innards in the fountain
piece and people are sitting having their lunches, tea, coffee, whatever, looking
at this incredible exploding fountain.
And Perceval it references the fact that it used to be farmland.
It would've been farmed with Yeah.
Animals like Perceval and also, in our folk art collection, we've got
lots of those little figures that would've sat on people's mantle pieces.
You know, you can imagine them, the kind of small versions of the shire
horse that would've been there.
So I suppose thinking about yeah, artwork that's playful and that,
yeah, might get you to engage with art in different ways as well.
Claire Bown: And all of this is working towards your values of making art more
accessible to people who might otherwise feel intimidated by such a space.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Geraldine Collinge: And you know, we are in a beautiful historic landscape.
We are in a very manufactured, shaped landscape.
It's absolutely beautiful.
We're in this beautiful old stately home, but you know, some
people will be put off by that.
Some people will think, yeah, this is a place that isn't for people like me.
And we absolutely want it to be for everybody.
So there was some feedback after an event recently and somebody
written on the feedback form.
I came to come to Compton Verney and realized that it was a place for people
like me and that felt really special.
That's a win.
So yeah, definitely was really, really proud of those moments.
Claire Bown: And you referred to the outside space there, which we
haven't yet really talked about.
Being surrounded with all this nature, this landscape around you, even your
mission talks about connecting people with art and nature and creativity.
So how does the setting.
Unique setting, I guess, influence your approach?
Geraldine Collinge: Yeah.
I think in the early days we were more about the building and about the things
being inside the building and probably over the last kind of eight years, Compton
Verney's built more things outside.
There was a big restoration project of the ground starting to
interpret the grounds more and now it feels really, really integral.
For me it's one experience.
So I want people to experience the whole thing, not just either come to
the grounds or go to the gallery, I really want people to have a great
experience of art, nature and creativity across both inside and outside.
A lot of our visitors talk about Compton Verney, being a place
that really makes you feel better.
And that sense of it as being a restorative place.
Once you are into Compton Verney itself, you walk through some lovely
woods and you get to a bridge.
And people often talk about that sense of going over the bridge and being
like, oh, you're taking a deep breath.
You go over the bridge and you are into this kind of wonderland.
So I think it's part of the whole experience.
It is part of what visitors describe about being really special about here.
And yeah, it's absolutely at the core of what we do.
It also makes you think about all the different ways that
you can be regenerative.
So whether you are experiencing nature or whether you are experiencing
art inside, the different ways that you can have that experience.
And lots of school teachers and parents talk about that kind of the
magic that's around each corner.
So the things that you can discover, the wonder of it, and that's
definitely feels super important.
So being in relation to landscape absolutely shapes who we are.
We've worked with artists who work specifically thinking about landscape.
So we did a brilliant installation in a coppice called Living Symphonies
and, each species was programmed with a different sound, so you sat in
the coppice and you experienced the different sounds, depending on whether
it was a cloudy day or if it started raining, you started getting different
sounds around you and it was such a beautiful, beautiful experience.
And that when you went each time it was different.
So in some ways it was a bit like itself that, each time you go, you
could just give us something new.
And that was, yeah, it was a really beautiful thing to experience in
the landscape that was about the landscape, but enhance the landscape.
And I mean for me it was a complete treat, to go each lunchtime and
to spend some time, sitting in this incredible installation.
And we, so we launched a sculpture park last March for our 20th anniversary.
So having had sculpture through the grounds and sculpture that I suppose
challenges us to think about what's in the landscape, who's the landscape's for.
Obviously, when Capability Brown was working on it, he was thinking about
particular kind of people and we might be thinking about a broader public now.
Really trying to challenge who's the landscape for, it talks about a very
kind of quintessential englishness with the beautiful lake and the bridge
and we'll have sheep and lambs in a minute, all being, very perfectly
beautiful in the bucolic landscape.
But I'm really keen that we ask ourselves questions about, yeah, there wouldn't
have been any sculpture by women in the landscape, years ago, Capability Brown,
Robert Adam wouldn't have imagined that.
And, we've got Helen Chadwick's 'Piss Flowers', we've got Louise Bourgeois
Spider, sitting right next to the house.
So yeah, it's super important and, but it is interesting, but I don't necessarily
think of it in a separate box, like I really want to think of it as one thing
together, and one whole experience.
And, the landscape enables us to do things that other people can't do.
We're super lucky to have it.
So we work with this company called Digbeth Dining from Birmingham, which
is not too far from here, so 45 minutes up the road and that is a dining
experience, so loads of different popup vans with different kind of food.
They had DJs and the first time we did that, there was 2000 people arrived
on site and just had a gorgeous time hanging out on the grounds.
And, we do wild swimming.
We'll do, birdwatching?
You know, really thinking about other things that we
can, that the grounds enables.
Claire Bown: And tell me about breathing with the forest as well.
'cause that bridges the indoor outdoor experience as well, doesn't it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Geraldine Collinge: Yeah, breathing with the forest is a piece by
Marshmallow Laser Feast, who are an incredible digital first company.
And I first experienced their work at the Royal Shakespeare Company.
They were talking to us about sharing some of their practice,
just exchanging how they worked.
And I remember it so clearly, I was queuing in the green room for some food
and they shared this headset experiences, VR experience that they'd made.
And suddenly I was in a forest.
You know, I wasn't standing by the sausages in the queue.
Sort of like, wow.
And a lot of their work has been forest-based.
They've done a lot of work thinking about trees, forest, natural world.
And breathing with the landscape was set in a Colombian rainforest.
So there was a digital experience that we had in the Adam Hall and the
space that I've just talked about.
And it was the first time in a long time that we've had an
artistic experience for everybody.
So it just being an artistic experience in that space.
And what was really lovely is that they embedded it into our place, so that you
arrived at the welcome center and you were encouraged to walk through the ground.
We've got this beautiful avenue of Wellingtonia trees, so to
walk through those Wellingtonia trees to spend some time.
Breathing our, breathing our forest, breathing with arteries.
Thinking about what the world might be like in the future, what these trees
might be like in the future, their ancient, very special ancient trees.
And then to, so to spend that time in our landscape and to walk into
the space and you went through the you walked through the galleries.
And then went in through our Northern European Gallery into the Adam Hall
and yeah, there was huge, great big screens with incredible scans of
the trees in the rainforest and you could see the bubbles of the water
and the sap and, the insects that surrounded them and the sound of that.
So it was a really beautiful meditative experience.
And some people spent, an hour or more in there, really enjoying it.
And again, for everybody, I think people found particularly young
people with maybe additional needs, really suddenly totally calmed in the
space and really appreciated that.
And, I'd had a stressful board meeting, to be honest.
I appreciated spending some time with that.
So yeah, it was a real treat and a really brilliant work that
yeah, that crossed the threshold between the inside and the outside.
And yeah we're sad to see it go, but space is now full of other activities, so yeah.
Claire Bown: Absolutely.
Sounds so magical as well.
Totally immersive.
Tell me what's next for Compton Verney?
Any exciting initiatives, exhibitions that are coming up.
Geraldine Collinge: Yeah.
We've got a new sculpture arriving, which I can't talk about yet.
This is very exciting.
So that will come in summer.
We've got a small turnaround, so if people want to see spider, they need to come
before the end of July and that leaves and then something else will come in.
So yeah, I'm super excited about that.
We've got an exhibition by Emma Talbot, who's a Italian based artist
and she does a lot of work on silks.
And about Greek myths.
Really beautiful work.
And it's her first UK big UK show, so it'd be great to see that here.
And yeah we're heading into summer, loads of brilliant events over
summer, we had some of the hits from last year are coming back.
We had lots of fun with inflatables and with bubbles last year, so
there's more of that to come.
So yeah, a really brilliant range of great activity.
And our housemartins will be back on the front of the house
and that is always a treat.
That's one thing I. I love about comp money is watching the changing seasons.
And last week, on Monday I don't know, somewhere between Monday and Tuesday,
the cowslips all came out and now the grounds are covered in cowslips.
And then the migrating birds will come.
It's just, yeah.
It's really extraordinary to get, to see that kind of changing landscape, like
I say, is a treat for me and the other people who are here really regularly.
So we are lucky that we've got some great members who come a lot and also enjoy
seeing those kind of changing seasons.
Claire Bown: Yeah.
Wonderful.
And you talked about members who come a lot, visitors.
We've talked about your values, we've talked about play and connecting
art and nature, making it accessible and open to lots of people.
So what do you hope that visitors take away from their
experience at Compton Verney?
Geraldine Collinge: We talk about people having a day full of joy.
That's one of the things that we really want people to have is a day full of joy.
And also that thing I talked about a bit earlier on, about
kind of energy, joy, and surprise.
But yeah, those, all those gorgeous emotions.
So yeah.
Want people to have a brilliant time.
Claire Bown: That's brilliant.
That's a wonderful note to end our conversation on as well.
How can people find out more about you and get in touch?
Geraldine Collinge: So we're on all the major social media channels,
Facebook, Instagram, TikTok.
comptonverney.org.uk.
is our website or if you are local, please come and visit us.
We are open Wednesday to Sundays, 10 till five, sometimes later
if we've got a special event on.
But yeah, come and have a look, see what you think.
Claire Bown: Lovely.
I will, next time I'm in the area.
Thank you Geraldine, so much for being on The Art Engager
Geraldine Collinge: Not at all.
Thank you Claire.
Really nice to meet you.
Claire Bown: So a huge thank you to Geraldine for sharing
her insights with us today.
You can find out more about Compton Verney on their website
or follow them on social media.
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