Site Specific Art at Nunnington Hall

Layla Khoo is a practice-based first year PhD researcher at the University of Leeds, and an artist specialising in site specific installations. Her PhD research originated from her installation Change In Attitudes and the expected and unexpected outcomes and effect on visitor experience and engagement with the site and collection. It considers the role of public participatory contemporary art installations within heritage sites and collections, how this may affect visitor engagement with heritage narratives, and how any effect can be measured and evaluated. Specifically, the research will lead to the creation of two site specific installations in response to the site, collections and narratives at Hardwick Hall to investigate these themes. Connect with Layla on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn, and check out her website and university profile.

Nunnington Hall, National Trust Images/Tom Carr

I began creating participatory work in 2019 when I created Change in Attitudes for National Trust property, Nunnington Hall. Nunnington Hall is a Tudor Hall in the small village of Nunnington in North Yorkshire, bequeathed to the National Trust in 1952 by owner Margaret Fife. She had inherited the hall in 1920 and subsequently renovated it and resided there with her husband Col Ronald Fife and their two adopted daughters, Susan and Rosalind. The Stone Hall is the main entrance to the house, and is decorated primarily with the taxidermy hunting ‘trophies’ of animals hunted by Col. Fife, including leopard and tiger skins, elephant tusks and heads of a variety of smaller animals such as antelope, deer, boar, goat, impala and antelope.

Mounted taxidermy heads in the Stone Hall

My brief was to create a piece of work which not only responded to the collection but also opened a dialogue with visitors. The Stone Hall and the taxidermy collection had proved unpopular with visitors (anecdotally it was referred to in conversations with staff as ‘the room of death’) who either didn’t want to look at it at all, or objected to the remains being displayed by the National Trust. The team at Nunnington Hall were about to send the big cat skins away for conservation work and wanted to take this opportunity to engage visitors in a conversation about this unpopular piece of the collection.

Mounted tiger, lion and leopard skins in Stone Hall with interpretation panels

They wished to create a ‘safe space’ for this to take place and for visitors to make up their own minds as to how they felt about these objects, both in a historical and contemporary context.  The installation of the art work could take any form I chose, as long as it could not be perceived as imposing either my opinion, or what could be perceived as the National Trust’s opinion, on the topic of hunting. After a period of research into both the collection and the memoirs of Col. Fife (the individual responsible for hunting all of the displayed taxidermy), the final installation was inspired by the black rhino horn. This is the only piece of the taxidermy collection which can no longer be displayed due to the high risk of theft.

Black Rhino Horn, Nunnington Hall Collection

I created an installation of 5,000 porcelain models of rhino horns to represent the 5,000 black rhinos left in the world. The horns were displayed on the walls of a purpose built ‘room’ structure to sit within the Stone Hall amongst the taxidermy collection. The circular structure measured 2 metres in height and 2.5 metres in diameter. 500 of the model horns were mounted on the outside of the structure, the remaining 4,500 could only be seen by entering the ‘room’ via a small doorway.

Change in Attitudes installation, National Trust/Anthony Chappel Ross

Visitors were invited to make a choice – they could take a horn and keep it as a token of their visit, but in doing so they were told that it would not be replaced and thus, this would leave less for others to see. If they made this choice visitors were instructed to write their name and the date in the place of the horn they had taken, to take ownership for this choice. Permanent marker pens were available for visitors to help themselves to, and there was no requirement for visitors to interact with staff in order to take a horn or record their choice. Alternatively, they could leave the installation intact for others to see. The horns were mounted on the structure using Velcro, so visitors were encouraged to touch the pieces, and could remove a piece and return it without causing any damage. By inviting visitors to consider collecting, scarcity, and historical social norms in light of current views by making a participatory choice, I hoped that the taxidermy would be more actively engaged with.

Change in Attitudes installation, copyright National Trust credit Anthony Chappel Ross

I had hoped that the concept would encourage visitors to have conversations and discuss the issues raised by the work and the collection, but I hadn’t expected the strong emotional responses expressed by visitors – not just about the work and the collection, but in how other visitors were responding to it, and the choices they were making. Volunteer room guides had to undergo additional training with the Visitor Experience team to prepare them for how to answer questions from visitors and how to avoid being drawn into emotive debates with visitors. Visitors contacted me via email and social media to ask whether I was upset that people had begun to take the horns. This comment in the visitor book reflected the anecdotal information the room guides were giving -  “Thought provoking installation and response to the collection. SHAME ON THOSE WHO REMOVED A TROPHY” -  I visited the site once a month to count how many horns had been taken so that a running total could be provided on social media.

Change in Attitudes installation, close up of mounted porcelain rhino horns

In the final months of the installation I was contacted by the team at Nunnington Hall and asked to visit the site to advise on what actions should be taken now visitors had begun interacting with the work in a new way. Over the previous week, visitors had begun using the permanent markers to write their own comments on the structure of the installation. These first comments were written on the side of the installation hidden from the view of the room invigilator, suggesting that visitors knew that what they were doing was not ‘allowed’ and did not wish to be observed doing so. Upon seeing one comment written on the structure in this way, others presumably felt emboldened to do the same – but again, out of sight of the room guide. My first feelings on seeing these comments were excitement and curiosity. This participation had not been expected or designed into the project, but I interpreted this as a different level of visitor engagement.

Visitors were so emotionally invested in both the work and the narrative that they were now breaking from expected behaviour in a museum environment to effectively vandalise a piece of art with their own graffiti. Visitors already had the ‘right to reply’ by means of a Visitor Book, as well as feedback questionnaires – so why did they then wish to comment in such a public and unauthorised way? I agreed with the National Trust team that we would leave the first few comments to see what happened next. At no point would visitors be encouraged or given permission to write on the structure in this way, but they wouldn’t be prevented from doing so either.

Selection of comments written by visitors

The National Trust team supported this plan of action on the understanding that this would be kept under review – if visitors used the pens on anything else in the house then access would need to restricted, and if any comments written on the walls of the structure were perceived by the National Trust to be inappropriate, these comments would need to be censored in some way. Within two weeks the comments written on the walls had multiplied, and were now being written in full view of the room guide. I supplied the hall staff with paint to allow them to cover over any comments they deemed inappropriate – the censored comments fell in to three categories: swearing (the property is a family site, and so any language unsuitable for children had to be removed), aggressive (the aim was to create a ‘safe space’ for open discussion on what we knew to be a contentious subject – the team felt people wouldn’t make a free choice when faced with aggressive comments about the choices others had made) and irrelevant (social media handles, political slogans irrelevant to the issues of the artwork and house, declarations of love between initials ‘BB 4 DP 4EVA’ – toilet door graffiti).

Volunteers at the house had mixed responses to this new and unexpected development. Some were fascinated by what people had written, some were frustrated by the inconvenience of having to check the comments each day for those which had to be painted over, others were appalled by the behaviour of visitors who were in essence scrawling graffiti on a work of art in a stately home.

What are your thoughts?