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Here we have one element of an art installation called ‘Green Dwelling’. In 2021 it was sited in the Old Town Meadow of Compton Verney Art Gallery & Park, a grand Warwickshire venue for some magnificent art, ancient, old, and contemporary. Very well worth visiting.
But I’m not quite sure what to make of Green Dwelling as a whole, although for some reason I like this square. Perhaps it feels like a happier, more mundanely accessible version of Mark Rothko’s many ‘windows’, which I also admire, but find more challenging.
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Here are the 23 other blocks that comprise the installation.
Dutch artist Krijn de Koning was commissioned to create a work that would encourage people to engage with Compton Verney’s landscape, designed by Capability Brown in 1779. It also marks the site of the lost medieval village of Compton Murdak, the blocks placed to create new framed vistas, and arranged on mown pathways that might suggest the presence of the ancient settlement.
Well, as I said, I’m not quite sure what to make of the whole; perhaps more appealing in the conception than the physical manifestation. Perhaps, too, if I’d thought to venture closer, I might have become more involved. On the other hand, it looks to me as if the landscape, domesticated as it is, needs no such cues of engagement. In fact it rather outdoes the structures.
If I had walked to the further side of the square and looked through, I might have seen this kind of vista: Compton Verney Manor, essence of classical architecture – symmetry, perspective and lots of angles…
