The Mercer Art Gallery’s latest offering to mark three hundred years since the birth of Capability Brown will bring together a Scottish artist and a French professor ‘in conversation’ about Britain’s greatest landscape garden designer.
Kate Whiteford OBE, whose exhibition ‘False Perspectives’ is currently running at the Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate, will join Yves Abrioux, Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris 8 and writer on landscape and gardens, to discuss the inspiration and lasting influence of Capability Brown with the gallery’s curator, Jane Sellars.
Both Kate and Yves are steeped in the work of Britain’s foremost landscape garden designer, who changed the face of eighteenth century English parkland. Capability Brown created a magical world of woods, water and swathes of green that live on to this day at locations across Yorkshire, including Harewood, Burton Constable, Sledmere and Scampston.
Jane Sellars, the Mercer Art Gallery’s curator, said:
Kate Whiteford has previously created Capability Brown inspired land drawings, films and installations for both Harewood House and Compton Verney. In the Mercer exhibition False Perspectives, which includes large scale tree prints in dazzling red and green, she explores the ways in which Brown played with perspective in order to deceive the viewer.
Both Kate and Yves have tremendous knowledge of art and garden history so this will be a stimulating Mercer event.
‘In conversation with Kate Whiteford’ takes place at the Mercer Art Gallery at 2pm on Monday 15 August. Cost, including refreshments, is £8.
Kate Whiteford’s exhibition, False Perspectives, is at the Mercer Art Gallery until 18 September.
Details of the exhibition and many more activities surrounding the 300th anniversary of the birth of Capability Brown can be found in the Mercer Art Gallery summer events programme, available from the gallery itself and Harrogate TIC or go to https://www.harrogate.gov.uk/summer16events
