Chatsworth House Trust commissions new installation

Chatsworth House Trust have commissioned Natasha Daintry to create a new installation, Sowing Colour, featuring 235 porcelain pots.

Sitting alongside artworks acquired by the Dukes of Devonshire over the last four centuries, Natasha’s installation of 235 porcelain pots introduces colour and light to the Dome Room.

Inspiration for Sowing Colour came from the garden and landscape of Chatsworth, and the house’s relationship to the word ‘culture’, in the sense of human culture, as well as the cultivation of earth and plants.  Natasha was struck by the vigour of swirling plant roots in the vegetable garden and envisaged a work pulsing with energy using colour and dramatic shifts in scale.  The Fibonacci sequence gave Natasha a dynamic structure to express movement through fired static pots.

Starting at the top of the installation, a mass of tiny coloured pots grow near to 1m in height at the base of the piece embodying the vigorous progression of Fibonacci’s mathematical sequence. This sequence of growth (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 and 13) is expressed in both the dimensions of the pots as well as the height of the space they inhabit in each layer.

Natasha has developed over fifty glazes to create a riot of finely balanced coloured pots, which cascade down eight layers of shelving to radiate colour.

Natasha said of the commission:-

‘This project is my most ambitious to date and has taken almost two years to complete, involving many technical challenges of working in porcelain on this scale and collaboration with technicians and engineers.  It has been a joy to make and is wonderful to see it finally installed.’

Sowing Colour by Natasha Daintry will be on public view at Chatsworth from 25 March 2018.