Artist Dominic McHenry likes wood. Specifically, the 'lovely, polished, rich, chocolatey wood' in the Long Library at Eastnor Castle. 'It's just so imbued with history,' he says. 'Generations of people have polished it.'
You might expect an artist to have been drawn to a different detail – a painting, perhaps, or one of the sculptures. But Dominic began his career as a sculptor working almost exclusively with wood, crafting totemic pieces that reflect his obsession with geometric shapes and repeated patterns. He then expanded his practice to include paintings, making the pigments himself using centuries-old techniques and housing his finished works in hand-carved frames.
And from this month, you can see his work at Eastnor Castle. Dominic is our first-ever artist in residence, thanks to The Dot Project and Heritage Xplore, and he has spent the past month living and working inside the castle, creating a suite of pieces directly inspired by its architecture and decoration. He adds to a lineage that stretches back to the castle's foundations: for over 200 years, artists, writers and poets have been drawn to Eastnor, and Dominic is the latest to add his chapter to the castle’s creative heritage.
Dominic in his workshop at Eastnor Castle
'What I found so moving about Eastnor is the layers of decoration,' he says. 'Everything has a level of handmade decoration, down to tiny little beadings around the room, or borders around doors. I really tried to put this into my paintings.'
The works he has created distil elements of Eastnor into neat, repetitive forms – almost a counterpoint to the castle's unruly, imperfect maximalism. In his pieces, you can recognise colours and lines from specific rooms: one reflects the merging of the Somers and Cocks family crests in the Gothic Drawing Room; another takes its palette from the Chinese Bedroom, where he fell in love with the handcrafted wallpaper. But during his time at Eastnor, he wasn't always drawing from the “obvious” places.
'I'm not necessarily looking at the actual paintings at Eastnor,' he says. 'I was looking more at the architecture, the interior design, or even the carpets and rugs – anything with a repeating pattern.'
He also found a great deal of inspiration in the private chapel, which is practically hidden inside the castle and rarely gets the attention lavished on front-cover spaces such as the Gothic Drawing Room or Long Library. And it was in the chapel that wood pulled at him again. 'I've done some turned wood on the frames, which is a direct response to some of the religious iconography in the chapel,' he says. 'I'm not a religious person, but I just love a quiet room of that kind. It's like an art gallery in a way.'
His finished pieces, he hopes, won't stand out. His aim is that they blend in – that you almost don't notice them among the rooms they inhabit. It's an ambition that's only really possible somewhere like Eastnor, where every room is already thick with accumulated objects, and nothing feels placed so much as arrived. And that layered, lived-in quality was what Dominic loved most.
'Going somewhere where everything is exciting to look at – it's gilded, it's carved, it's painted, it's decorated – is so rewarding and rich,' he says. 'As a society, we seem to be stripping everything back to a flat, boring, mundane plane. Being around that level of decoration and design is so important. Plus, if I'm working and look up and see something interesting, it helps feed the creative juices.'
Dominic's pieces will be on display throughout June, with self-guided tours on 21 and 22 June. He joins the generations-deep artistic legacy that has been accumulating, layer by layer, ever since the first stone was laid. Another artist has left his mark on Eastnor's walls. Touch wood, he won't be the last.
Images by Milo Jack Paris Hutchings
Dominic McHenry’s works will be displayed at Eastnor Castle from 5–22 June. All works are for sale via The Dot Project; thedotproject.com