Conversation pieces

Anyone interested in art holidaying in the Lake District this summer — or indeed taking a short break in the Lakes — is in for a treat. The Lakeland Arts Trust, which administers both Blackwell and Abbot Hall, has mounted a pair of exhibitions which offers a range of painting and sculpture a good deal better than most things currently on view around the country. And many people may find that tuning into the wild beauty of Cumbria will help them to look with greater enjoyment and discernment at contemporary art.

Certainly Baillie Scott’s magnificent 1898 Arts and Crafts house, Blackwell, on the shores of Lake Windermere, is the perfect setting for Halima Cassell’s work in clay, glass, marble and porcelain. Here architecture frames and complements her sculptural explorations, as the landscape frames and contextualises Baillie Scott’s building. The total environment (nature, architecture, art) is thus to be experienced and relished both sequentially and concurrently.

Blackwell has the most marvellous views across Windermere, and to see Cassell’s sculptures installed in the ultra elegant White Drawing Room against the backdrop of mountains and water is to appreciate fully the subtle strength of their forms, which could so easily be overawed by the magnificence of the setting. Her first ever marble sculpture, ‘Folded Teardrop’, in Portuguese pink marble, carved after a residency last year at Pietrasanta in Tuscany, is like a drapery study in the form of a vertical horn or seashell. It looks particularly evocative when a yacht appears on the lake, and sail and sculpture come into long-distance conjunction. The marble sits on a plinth and takes the light, glowing inwardly more white than pink. In another part of the room, in a window embrasure, Cassell’s chunky glass ‘Amoeba Pool II’, in rhubarb lead crystal, sustains an expressive dialogue with Baillie Scott’s stained-glass flowers above.