Ann Carrington’s Extraordinary Imagination
Ann Carrington (b. 1963). Shomu-en, 2023, silver, nickel and steel plated cutlery. Photography by Sam Angel.
Featured Image above: Ann Carrington in her studio. Photography by Alexa Clarke Kent.
Every morning, Ann Carrington wakes up ready to create. It’s been that way for the British artist since she was a young child.
“I just feel compelled, really, to make things. It’s just something that’s in my bones,” Carrington says. “When I was little, I enjoyed the process of starting with a flat piece of paper and being able to manipulate it into something amazing. I like people to be able to look at something ordinary, something you might see every day, and then be able to look at it with fresh eyes because I’ve made something with it.”
In the current exhibition at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens, INTERVENTIONS: Ann Carrington, Carrington brings a fresh approach and engages with the Historic Mansion in exciting ways, such as creating stunning, cascading metal bouquets of flowers from ordinary silverware.
The internationally known Carrington, who lives and works in Margate, England, has created artwork for the United Nations and the Royal Family as well as having works in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art, among others. INTERVENTIONS is an arts initiative to activate the historic period rooms in Cheekwood’s Mansion. Now in its third year, the series invites renowned artists like Carrington from around the globe to imagine and implement a connection between their contemporary work and Cheekwood.
Carrington created bespoke bouquets inspired by the flora of Cheekwood’s 13 gardens, and remarkably, the flowers are made of silver, nickel, and steel cutlery. Carrington’s reimagined flowers include roses made of silver teaspoons; dahlias made of fork tines; viburnum, black-eyed Susans, purple passionflowers, and crepe myrtle blooms constructed out of assorted sizes of spoons and handles, often using ball bearings and nails as stamen; and peonies made with Art Deco berry spoons.
Ann Carrington (b. 1963). Details. Kousa, Cora, American Rose, 2023 , silver, nickel and steel plated cutlery. Photography by Sam Angel.
“Different flowers lend themselves to different types of spoons,” Carrington shares. “For the roses, the petals need to be very floppy and have a bit of movement in them, so I use silver-plated spoons, which are much softer. It’s much more malleable, so you can hammer them with a hammer. Whereas something like this [points to her bouquet, titled Kousa] needs to be really strong because it’s thin at the stems, so that’s steel.”
The bouquets have an immediate connection to the Cheek Estate, but other works in the exhibition dive deeper into the family’s history. For example, the enchanting equestrian-themed tapestry, Horsa, was inspired by the Cheek family’s love for horses. The tapestry, or “magic carpet,” as Carrington charmingly refers to it, is intricately woven with horse brasses, brass plaques, bits, keys, and chains.
Ann Carrington (b. 1963). Details. Black Eyed Susan, 2023, silver, nickel and steel plated cutlery. Photography by Sam Angel.
Ann Carrington (b. 1963). Shaker Maker & Shaker Quaker, 2024, silver pepper pots, napkin rings and tureen handles. Photography by Sam Angel.
Carrington’s chosen medium of manipulating, forging, and sculpting metal is laborious and intricate. She works with heating techniques like soldering and welding, the latter of which she learned about a decade ago specifically so she could fuse her metal flowers into elaborate, formidable bouquets. There’s an added complexity as well: Because she uses found objects and scrap metal, initially she doesn’t always know what is under the surface of the material she’s working with.
“Different methods require different ways of joining,” Carrington shares. “Welding is my preferred way, but you can only weld steel. And silver requires soldering because welding is very hot, it melts the silver. Or they might need to be brazed, but quite often you don’t know what you’re dealing with because they are secondhand spoons – they’ve been made in different eras. Some of them are 200 years old, some of them are 10 years old, some of them are brand new. So, until you start, you don’t know quite what they’re going to do.”
The revelry and fulfillment Carrington experiences in making her art is palpable. Her smile widens as she shares her affinity for a piece she made a decade ago, Manhattan Mettle, a large-scale rendering of the Manhattan skyline built from scrap metal for the W Hotel in Hoboken, New Jersey.
“What made it fun was that we had to be able to do it quickly, and we can’t glue these things onto the wall; we can’t weld onto the wall. I thought, ‘What about a giant magnet?’ So, we covered the wall in giant magnetic tiles and then I projected my drawing of New York onto the magnets. We had cherry pickers, and we were just building New York from scraps of metal. It’s still there and it looks incredible.”
Another technique that Carrington uses in her work is repoussé, which is a French word for the ornamental patterns in relief made by hammering a material (such as copper or another metal) so that a shape pops out the other side. Two works displayed near the elevator on the Loggia Level of the Mansion incorporate repoussé: Rose Cent, inspired by the U.S. penny coin made between 1859-1900 and Flipside, inspired by the 1929 U.S. Liberty coin.
“My father was a collector of coins and stamps, so I like enlarging stamps and coins and then you can see the drawing and the design in them,” Carrington says.
Rose Cent has an interesting backstory, which transpired while Carrington was traveling in Morocco.
“That idea came about when I was in Marrakesh,” Carrington relates. “I had it in my head that I wanted to make these big coins and there was a guy hammering copper, making this repoussé tray. I really liked it, and I said, ‘How much is that?’ And he said some crazy amount. I asked, ‘How’d you come up with that price? And he said, ‘I charge per bang.’ And I just thought, ‘More bang for your buck.’ And then I thought, I’m going to go back to my studio and try this and that’s how it started.”
Not all of Carrington’s work is figurative. One sculpture on display at Cheekwood, titled Arrokoth, is her most abstract. Arrokoth is named after the most distant object that NASA spacecraft has photographed. She beams while explaining the concept.
Ann Carrington (b. 1963). Rose Cent, 2023, hammered pewter. Photography by Sam Angel.
Ann Carrington (b. 1963). Arrokoth, 2023, silver, nickel, and steel plated spoons. Photography by Sam Angel.
“This object is like two planets that are merged together in an interesting, conjoined shape, and it has this bubbly surface,” she says. “I just felt I could interpret it really well with ladles. It’s my favorite piece. I just find it deeply satisfying, the shades in the silver and all the reflections that you get,” Carrington adds.
Visitors to Cheekwood have an amazing opportunity to view it, along with 32 of her other inventive and imaginative creations, on display through October 27, 2024.
