Two’s company Imogen Lycett Green meets Langlands & Bell
Charleston is nearly ready for visitors – the walled garden is weeded and edged, the flowerbeds bright with tulips and forget-me-nots; a hoover hums quietly in the farmhouse; a seamstress sits stitching a rag rug from the bedroom of John Maynard Keynes. Here is the familiar round pond, there is the Virginia creeper climbing up the walls, everywhere is chalk and flint, unchanged. In the farmyard, even the chirrup-chirrup of nesting sparrows cannot break the film of stillness. Into this revered space, so beloved of Bloomsbury devotees, walk Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell, an unlikely pair, you would have thought, to marry up with figurative artists Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell [no relation]. Yet Langlands & Bell, first bought by Charles Saatchi for the notorious YBA show in 1992, have been invited here to make three exhibitions. “After you,” I whisper. It feels like breaking and entering as we tiptoe through the terracotta-tiled old kitchen, and follow an emerald green runner up, up into the empty house. Langlands & Bell are introducing me to Near Heaven, their new installation in Vanessa Bell’s attic studio, a space that has been for years, until now, chock-full of abandoned objects and empty frames, old chairs and dusty files. They encourage me forward, through a tiny door, up the narrow wooden stairs. The stairs creak, as attic stairs should, in a house full of ghosts. “You first,” they say. At the top, I push open the small door. Gasp. I face an enormous five-paned window with stone mullions (Vanessa had the original small farmhouse window reconfigured in 1939) with a view over the walled garden, to the far Weald and beyond. The day is hazy, blue at the edges. The north light is gentle.
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“Angelica Garnett, Vanessa’s daughter, described her mother’s studio as near heaven,” says Nikki. Ben says, “Virginia Nicholson [Vanessa Bell’s granddaughter] told us she slept up here in the attic when she was little, but she never went into the studio. She was not forbidden, but she felt it wasn’t appropriate to enter.” Now the room is empty but for a vase of narcissi on the window ledge and two busts – one of Virginia Woolf and another of celebrated Pre-Raphaelite beauty Julia Stephen, Virginia and Vanessa’s mother. Hung to the right, there is a charcoal drawing by Duncan Grant, of Vanessa, drawn a month before she died on 7th April, 1961, and a digitalised portrait of Vanessa, made by Langlands & Bell. Leaning against the wall is Vanessa Bell’s original mirror, which she used to make self-portraits. The vaulted ceiling has been lined with more mirrors, installed by Ben and Nikki. “We want you to stand in the physical space where Vanessa stood. Look at the marks and traces left,” says Nikki, her hand trailing down the door frame. “You see the circles above the door, and these nice squiggles like a serpentine up the side of the door frame.” Nikki falls silent as the three of us look up, catching ourselves in the many angles of the mirrored ceiling. “Living at Charleston with these big personalities,” says Ben, “Angelica was a child growing up in a hall of mirrors and she felt as a child her own ego was reflected back at her by all these massive egos.” Nikki adds: “Art is about relationship.”
