Wolterton 2026

  • Phyllida Barlow and Daisy Parris

    Wolterton's Arts & Culture Programme 2026
    Simon Oldfield & Associates presents two major exhibitions of work by Phyllida Barlow and Daisy Parris at Wolterton Hall as...

    Simon Oldfield & Associates presents two major exhibitions of work by Phyllida Barlow and Daisy Parris at Wolterton Hall as part of its 2026 Art & Culture Programme.  Conceived by Artistic Director and Lead Curator, Simon Oldfield, Conceived by Artistic Director and Lead Curator, Simon Oldfield, the programme is delivered in collaboration with Guest Curators Clare Lilley and Gemma Rolls-Bentley. 

     

    Installed throughout the Hall’s historic interiors and surrounding grounds, the exhibitions set two distinct contemporary practices against one of Britain’s most assured Palladian houses. Built in 1741, Wolterton’s symmetry and restrained grandeur belong to an architectural language designed to communicate permanence and authority. Against this certainty, both artists act deliberately and with conviction to disrupt and test boundaries, physically, materially and emotionally. At Wolterton, the interaction between contemporary artworks and the Hall’s architecture and landscape becomes central to the programme, allowing each practice to challenge and reframe the historic environment in different ways.

  • Phyllida Barlow: disruptor

    Phyllida Barlow: disruptor

    Opening on 20 May 2026, Phyllida Barlow: disruptor, curated by Guest Curator Clare Lilley in collaboration with Simon Oldfield, unfolds across three rooms at Wolterton and into the landscape beyond. disruptor brings together more than 70 works spanning over  five decades of the artist’s career, from works on paper to large-scale sculptural installations. 

     

    Constructed from simple sculptural materials — plywood, scrim, plaster, cement, fabric and tape — Barlow’s works foreground their own making, with joins that remain visible, surfaces that are worked, and adjustments all legible to the viewer. Set against Wolterton’s marble, stone and decorative plasterwork, these materials create a striking contrast, grounded not in lineage but in labour and immediacy. Barlow’s sculptures activate and disrupt the architecture, rather than decorating it. 

  • Barlow resisted the idea of sculpture as noble or permanent: “I want sculpture to be as awkward as possible, to...

    Barlow resisted the idea of sculpture as noble or permanent: “I want sculpture to be as awkward as possible, to feel unstable, as if it might fall apart.” Throughout the exhibition, sculptural structures appear to press against or interrupt the clarity of the Palladian interiors, introducing imbalance and friction into spaces designed for composure and control. Barlow’s earliest surviving sculptures hang on  the smooth plaster walls of the Marble Hall. Made of clear sellotape (‘TORSO’) and black latex (‘LOAF’), Barlow wrapped the materials around her forearm to create the bulbous forms. Wall-based sculptures from across her career are brought together for the first time, and they disrupt the geometry and symmetry of the space designed for clarity and control. An important group of plinth works highlights Barlow’s observation that, “as soon as something stands upright it starts to pretend it has power, and that’s when I want to undermine it”, resonating directly within an architecture that itself depends upon upright assurance. 

  • Central to the presentation is a body of drawings dating from the 1970s to early 2010s, many rarely shown publicly....

    Central to the presentation is a body of drawings dating from the 1970s to early 2010s, many rarely shown publicly. In the Portrait Room, the drawings mark a shift in scale, installed in a dense salon-style arrangement that alludes to the history of the room and giving a window into the inner working of the artist as she drew barriers, stacks, and provisional structures. Barlow reshaped contemporary British sculpture by refusing polish and heroic permanence in favour of awkwardness, disruption, vulnerability and the visible trace of making. untitled: stackedchairs (2014) challenges the structural order of Wolterton; its piled forms embodying Barlow’s interest in precarious balance and everyday materials. Even at large scale, her work retains the sense of the hand: adjusted, reconsidered and held in tension rather than resolved. 

     

    PRANK: jinx; 2022/23, comprising large, rusted steel work tables, awkwardly stacked, further reveals Barlow’s sensitivity to material presence as it shifts with light and weather: sun sharpens its planes, rain deepens its colour, and shadow fractures its outline. The recurring white motif, which Barlow called “rabbit ears”, perches atop the angular assembly; a playful flourish, it signals the moment when uprightness begins to “pretend” at authority. Against the formal Grade I-listed landscape of Wolterton, PRANK resists picturesque harmony, asserting an assembled structure – provisional rather than fixed – and, with Barlow’s characteristic wit, nudging sculptural order off balance.

  • “Phyllida Barlow approached sculpture not as an assertion of authority but as a negotiation – between gravity, effort and balance. Her stacked and braced forms seem always on the brink of collapse, yet it is precisely this precariousness that heightens our awareness of space and our own bodies moving through it, a tension especially vivid within Wolterton’s measured formality."                                - Clare Lilley, Guest Curator
  • Daisy Parris: Fist Full of Dreams

    Daisy Parris: Fist Full of Dreams

    Running concurrently, Daisy Parris will present Fist Full of Dreams, a solo exhibition curated by Guest Curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley and Simon Oldfield in a newly developed ground-floor gallery at Wolterton. Bringing together a new body of paintings made in response to the house and landscape alongside the artist’s first large-scale textile installation, the exhibition establishes a dialogue with Phyllida Barlow’s sculptural interventions elsewhere in the building. 

     

    Since graduating from Goldsmiths in 2014, Parris has become known for bold, emotionally charged paintings characterised by thick impasto, gestural mark-making and fragments of poetic text. Their works foreground raw surface and immediacy, inviting viewers to encounter an intense emotional register through paint. Inspired by the expansive skies and open horizons of the Norfolk landscape, the new works will bring a raw expressive force to Wolterton’s formal interiors, where structure meets gesture and authority meets vulnerability. 

     

    On their new works Parris comments: ‘I explored Wolterton Hall on a particularly muddy day. I was drawn to the run-down outbuildings and weathered structures dotted around the grounds - which is pretty typical for me to find the decay and dirt when presented with the utter beauty of the sprawling landscape and interiors of the Hall itself. I like how having my work shown in such a dramatic, historical place challenges the traditional techniques showcased in the paintings and tapestries on display. I like that I’m able to bring a bit of grit and angst to Wolterton and be unapologetic about it.'

     

    At the centre of the exhibition is Kiss the Storm, a five-metre textile installation, marking the first time Parris has worked in this medium. Commissioned through Textorial, a collaborative initiative extending contemporary artists’ practices into textile production, the work translates the urgency of Parris’s painting into woven form. Initially hand-knotted by a specialist studio in India, the textile installation was later worked back into by the artist through extensive hand stitching, creating a layered dialogue between traditional craftsmanship and the artist’s own intervention. There is a history of textile work within Daisy’s family, generations of women who knitted, sewed and made their own clothes. The sustained labour of stitching fostered a tangible connection to that domestic lineage.

  • “This year’s programme explores how contemporary art can inhabit, question, and transform inherited historic spaces. Phyllida Barlow’s work challenges Wolterton’s Palladian architectural certainty, while Daisy Parris introduces a raw, visceral emotion to its traditional interiors. By presenting these artists in dialogue we continue our commitment to presenting multigenerational British artists who disrupt visual culture.”     - Simon Oldfield, Artistic Director & Lead Curator