Petal Power

Do not be fooled by the whimsical fairy-tale qualities of Chatsworth’s new exhibition on flowers. There’s depth and serious discussion to be found aplenty. The show opens with Sister (Hut), a work by Chiara Camoni that fills the Painted Hall with its presence. Camoni’s practice involves gathering up organic matter – bones, bark and soil – from the land around her studio above the sea in the Tuscan mountains. This collecting sometimes happens with others in her community; it’s ritualistic, spiritual. Here, organic forms become black terracotta pieces, strings of teeth turn into a monumental cape, above which emerges a head with hair made from dried flowers. She’s powerful: part woman, part mythical goddess.

Her spirit, wondrous and dark, leads the way through a show that is at times delicate and fragile, yet layered with meaning. The cape was delivered – curator Allegra Pesenti tells us – in hundreds of boxes and reassembled on site over several days. The sense of stories being unboxed and unearthed persists. Artefacts as well as works of art have been drawn from Chatsworth’s collection; upstairs there are antique lace collars lit to reveal their intricate floral detail. The effect is unnerving, as though the ghosts have been invited down from the attic. There’s a mass of tulipières, so many as to seem surreal. And there are ancient books, including an 18th-century French herbarium found in the house’s library, which is opened to reveal a page where pressed parsnip plants flower out of a red conch shell. It feels childlike and familiar – time bends.

Pesenti’s skill is that the exhibits are arranged in such a way that they do not fight with the grandeur of the surroundings but appear to have sprung from within them. Their addition is like a spell – a story that rises to fill the rooms. At the foot of the sweeping staircase is a giant bronze foxglove by Dorothy Cross, the largest she’s ever made. The material, colour and texture make it seem at home; it’s the honey flower of cottage gardens. Yet as you approach it, it looms upwards, becoming threatening. Looking closer still you notice that some of the flower bells have been replaced by bronze fingertips. It’s witchy, and points to the folklore that says that if you touch it and lick your fingers, it’ll make you blind.

The foxglove is one of a number of works specially commissioned for the show. In the stone grotto a mirror by David Wiseman looks antique but comes newly installed from his gallery in Los Angeles. Its magical woodland frame calls to mind Snow White, though its tinted glass reflects not an evil queen but the Roman goddess Diana splashing with her nymphs in a fountain carved in the 17th century by Derbyshire sculptor Samuel Watson for the first duke. It’s part of the history of the house, which was one of the first to have running water. Seen as the protector of the countryside, she goes on through the centuries, whereas our reflection is temporary, ephemeral: it’s a memento mori.

More history – obscured history – is brought to light upstairs, with Kapwani Kiwanga’s installation, The Marias. In a room that glows yellow like a too-bright sun, paper peacock flowers stand up tall, opening from their buds. Making ornamental flowers, a great pastime of Victorian ladies, might seem harmless, but here they symbolise oppression, for the seeds of the peacock flower were used as a natural way to terminate pregnancy by women living under slavery, subjects of forced labour and sexual violence. The rooms are layered with meanings and Pesenti forces us to look deeper. She literally turns over the page in a room filled with Chris Ofili drawings, displayed in recto – in reverse. We see their unfinished backs, where the blank space hints at the stories left untold.

Underscoring the familiar/unfamiliar atmosphere is the fact that Chatsworth remains the Devonshire family home. There’s a bedroom-cum-salon filled with botanical watercolours painted by the plantswoman and artist Lady Emma Tennant (daughter of the 11th duke and his wife, the former Debo Mitford) dating from the 1980s to today – they’re innocent and scientific. Later, there’s a dark and beautiful oil painting by her granddaughter Cecily Lasnet of an orchid drooping in a plastic water bottle. It’s a modern still life, a longing for flowers amid the troubling world of plastic.

Written on a piece of unfolded paper, ‘the gorgeous nothings’ is a fragment of verse by Emily Dickinson, who wrote thousands of poems, though fewer than a dozen were published in her lifetime. It’s a fitting title for this theatrical show, where ‘nothing’ is just a slip of paper away from something more.

‘The Gorgeous Nothings: Flowers at Chatsworth’ continues until 5 Oct 2025. For more information, visit chatsworth.org

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