Peter Randall-Page’s Turf Maze is a drawing in and with nature, which exemplifies Paul Klee’s notion of ‘taking a line for a walk’. On first inspection it seems to be a flat motif. However, physically engaging it bestows a richly spatial experience that is dependent on movement and the fourth dimension; time.

Maclean often uses linear stainless steel components that have been mechanically burnished to what is described in industry, as ‘brushed’. These surfaces are not mirror polished, instead they capture softer, more blurred reflections. This makes them highly responsive to ambient light because their surfaces are not dominated by perfect reflections of the sculpture’s surroundings. Instead, they subtly capture the nuances and changes in tone and intensity of sunlight. 

Thresholds is a good example of this linearity, with its three giant portals creating an array of frames that trisect a circle. It therefore presents a variety of planar surfaces to the sun’s movement, which in turn produces bursts of light on its surfaces in different places at different times of the day. As well as being weather responsive, Thresholds is both frame and portal. In looking through, there is allusion to what is beyond, whereas whilst framing, it focuses the mind on the sculpture’s more immediate surroundings.

From the Artist “My sculptures explore human physical energy. They celebrate this energy for its own sake, capturing the exuberant side of what it is to be alive. I like to use humour and pathos as themes. The photographs of Edward Muybridge have always fascinated me – the precariousness of naked human momentum, captured in a series of snapshots of a given movement. Here, a man balances along the horizontal bough of an oak tree.

I mainly work with curved pieces of oak. I have a vocabulary of the kinds of shapes required, which I select from a large pile on the floor. The resulting sculpture is like an almost cubist assemblage, a series of facets that interplay to create a single dynamic form. The resulting sculpture may survive outside for around twenty years, weathering to a pale grey. Sometimes they are cast into bronze, so that they last forever.”

Denis O’Connor’s limestone Tower 4 is a dry-stone conical tower that protrudes up into the tree canopy to elevate a steel trinity motif. A bold sculptural statement: it delicately counterbalances a tiny aerial house with the earthbound mass and upward thrust of its supporting stone monolith.

This piece was one of the earlier commissions for the Sculpture Garden and has therefore lasted well, perhaps like Bog Oak, submersion in the lake is not an issue for longevity.

The 5 elements were carved by Kent, and they now sit on one of the underwater damns that sit at various places in the lake. Like sandbanks they are often revealed when the water level drops. This is a sculpture whose reach extends beyond physical form to also include its own shifting reflection in the water.

When coming across Matthews’ work there persists a sense that one might almost be viewing a three dimensional photograph, a possibility heightened by the way each animal or scene appears frozen in time. This temporal stasis is often the pregnant pause before action commences and something happens. One feels the weight borne by each hoof of the proud Stag, and how the visual distribution of force on the ground infers its next step.

This architectural exploration takes us into earthly foundations by implying a subterranean sculpture. Clark’s Ozymandic Arch explores a key structural device of building: the arch. The sculpture’s elemental geometry enlivened by its slanted embedding in the ground; this subverts horizontals and verticals to create an architectonic offset.

Ozymandic Arch has a pleasingly solid physicality and is of sufficient size that it requires the viewer to move around to see it all. Much in the same way we live in architecture, but with the difference of not being from within.

The life cycle of fauna is central to Fall and Rise. Gillespie's iconic effigy to Gaia is suspended in a beech tree and was constructed from the tree’s fallen beech nut husks, which the artist previously harvested at Burghley in the autumn prior to its installation.

Through geometric, colourful shapes, David Annesley uses an almost painterly approach exploring relationships of form and colour. He studied under Anthony Caro in the late 50s and held teaching posts at Central St Martins throughout the 1960s.

Fire is a large, bold work representing the liveliness of fire in a static sculpture. Fire was originally acquired for the Orton Centre in Peterborough in 1980. This piece, made of painted blue steel, is now on long term loan to Burghley Sculpture Garden.

There is a kind of rightness to each of Matthew's Cows, their vitality depends on her extensive knowledge of their anatomy, no doubt honed by a keen eye and years of observation. Combining this visual data with manual dexterity and a kinship for animals enables Matthews to simultaneously convey the generic species, depict individual character traits and to chart a specific scene. 

Intriguingly, she captures the sense of an individual, even in groups of the same species. Her sculptures therefore deal with not just what each animal looks like, but its nature, how it moves, how it lives and what it is. One thing is for sure - they are in no way sentimental renderings. These are animals that roam free, get diseased, get plastered in mud, fight, breed, raise young, malt and ultimately wither.

From the Artist: “When you're presenting sculptures in a large open environment, they can easily become insignificant. Colour is an excellent tool for giving presence, but it can also provide a kind of narrative. For example, with Spring Greens, its colour was based on a handrail that I found on an underground train. It's a manmade urban colour that's been brought into this natural environment; and this unnatural green will, at certain points in the year, merge into its background and at others, will stand out and look incongruous.

I think the open forms relate to drawing actually; they relate to this idea of a line that describes a volume; and that's a contradiction in a way because there's this delicate expressive agent that is moving around and trying to describe something solid. I'm trying to create a volume from something that's linear, so that's why you end up with a transparent structure. In a sense, wherever you put them they do relate to their context because you're looking through them to what's beyond.”

A snail whose shell has acquired the eight-sided geometry of one of Burghley’s octagonal towers. Its faceted planes of stainless steel capture and reflect light, whilst contrasting the russet rendering of mollusc flesh in rusted steel.

If this feat of architectural metamorphosis seems too far-fetched, just Google the bagworm moth larvae: creator of spiralling architectonic delights. Rogers has indented the snail’s foot with linear notches to create go slower stripes. This supersize gastro-bod is off on manoeuvres, rearing up in search of sustenance: woe betide the hostas!

Parthenogenesis is a natural form of asexual reproduction in which growth and development of embryos occur without fertilisation by sperm. In animals, parthenogenesis means development of an embryo from an unfertilised egg cell.

Much of Martyn’s work explores the natural world and forms found in fossils, seeds, and shells. These subjects share a common bond, in being vessels, which also form a cusp at a stage somewhere between life and death. Shells, usually found on the beach, also occupy the borderline between land and sea - a link between the tangible world of dry land and the unknown depths of the sea.

Seeds and the structures that contain them seem to be nothing but desiccated remains to be discarded and forgotten. They do however contain the future as well as the past, possessing the potential for new life and rebirth.

Up high is literally and metaphorically Pete Roger’s The Epicurean Expedition, inspired by the octagonal roof lantern that hangs over Burghley’s enormous kitchen. For those lucky enough to enjoy a roof visit, looking down into the lantern reveals Vermeer-like views bathed in a subtle light. A quality Rogers covets through his use of polished, sanded and satin finish stainless steel to reflect and capture sunlight. In Roger’s sculpture the roof lantern is lifted high like a rocket ship and plays host to a gang of mice on the hunt for cheese.

Campi Magnetici alludes to the earth’s invisible magnetic fields by arcing reflective rods between a huge block of locally mined Clipsham stone that was split in two and installed as a gateway. As well as acting as a portal, in windy weather it become a sonic sculpture, making increasing levels of noise as the wind rises.

This sculpture was fabricated from small lozenges of steel that are welded together. As well as the figurative external surface an intriguing part of the work is the network of structural struts that almost create a second ‘extra’ sculpture within the face.

What the Artist says:

"Steel released me. It gave me the ability to go huge, a scale that just is not possible with stone. It is the juxtaposition of steel in its raw form, cold-industrial, and the warm-human that my art breathes into it – that is my fascination."

Gothic might be considered to have a traditional kind of applied colour, its plasma cut steel components have been painted in a bright signal red. These chunky curvilinear elements providing a complementary colour pairing to the garden’s greens.

Armando Varela was born in Lima, Peru in 1933. He studied sculpture at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes (ENBA) Peru for eight years, graduating with the Gold Medal – the school’s highest award. He won a prestigious French Government Scholarship and spent one year at “L’Ecole des Beaux Arts” in Paris in 1963. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London from 1972 to 1973 and was a member of staff in the Sculpture department there from 1979 to 1998.

Richard Bett’s work is a union of sculpture and topiary. His witty depictions of animals rely on minimal anatomical details; primarily heads welded from aluminium. These rest on the outer surfaces of shrubs, which have been carefully gathered, tied, pulled, manipulated and finally cut, to give presence to the animal’s body. Man-made and natural materials merge into living statues, whose surface is in a constant state of growing flux.

Michele Ciribifera’s Elicoide BG is partly a contemporary exploitation of sunlight; fabricated from aluminium box section it simultaneously reflects light of differing intensities when viewed frontally. This is possible because its centrifugal struts project outwards at slightly different angles in relation to one another, and therefore the sun at any given time. Those struts directly facing the sun are highlighted and therefore do not read as mass, but pure light. 

When viewed laterally the sculpture’s physicality dissolves further as it shimmers like a vertical mirage, dancing across the landscape. As a counterpoint to the glinting reflections, it also casts distinctive linear shadows as the sun begins its westerly descent; delightfully these sometimes mark out geometry synonymous with the Nautilus spiral.

What the Artist Says:

“Three points in space united by stainless steel rods,
Linear axes that vibrate in the air
Like viewpoints,
Compressed forces that create tensions
Provoking flashes of torque,
Flexing the central axis,
Rotating alternately between solid and void
Creating a vortex.
The eye moves along curving lines,
Creating new points of view,
And the observer is tempted to enter,
To feel surrounded by the presence of organic and universal forms.”

Created by the Sculpture Garden’s first curator, Gnomen is a totemic sculpture carved from an Oak trunk that was felled on the Burghley estate. As the sculpture’s title suggests, the work also functions as a giant sundial.

Martyn feels a close relationship with the landscape and with his materials, preferring to work with materials from the area surrounding where he lives and works. He works almost exclusively in wood and stone which, due either to its size or shape, has no commercial value and would otherwise end up as firewood or be thrown back into the quarry.

Built from a structural framework of processed timber, this sculpture was then clad in a veneer of oak slab offcuts. Of course, the notion of cladding to finalise appearance is central to the conceptual undertow of his humongous Trojan Horse. 

Potentially a gift to the city of Troy, Fung’s From Far Away Great Changes Come As Forms You Thought You Knew is replete with a trapdoor, mane of sticks and tail of brushwood. It has even been assaulted by a flurry of arrows! 

Yet, despite the very analogue construction from wood, the artist had a more digital notion of infiltration in mind – that of the Trojan horse viruses used to fleece the unwary online or those tardy with their operating system security patches and software updates! This is a sculptural warning that if it seems too good to be true, it probably is and that sometimes it might pay to look a gift horse in the mouth.

A burning dynamic that reveals the transformative power of fire has been scorched by Stuart Ian Frost into the dual trunks of Iris. His pyrotechnic drawing adorns two halves of an oak felled from the Jubilee Wood in Burghley’s Parkland. 

Each has been branded with the fleur-de-lis, a heraldic motif present on a highly extravagant inlaid Gôle cabinet now residing in Burghley House’s Blue Silk Bedroom. It was originally made for the Sun King, Louis XIV to use at the Chateau de Vincennes.

The smaller trunk depicts the regal flower as a positive motif, whereas its larger counterpart converts it into a negative pattern. The burnt twins strike a powerful pose, leaning against the downward slope of the land to frame the surrounding laurels and shrubs.

Gillespie has installed a complementary spiritual offering; achieved by building the prone figure of her Held into one of the garden’s dry stone walls. Not so much a niche sculpture, but rather an oversize stone in the wall that seems partially in repose, whilst also implying the foetal cycle.

What the Artist says:

“The figure Held may appear either trapped within the wall or supported by it; condemned or about to be born. Whilst in the past some people have been walled up and left to die, others have found lifesaving protection from such intense hiding places.”

Standing Man series was carved on site by Keping in the early years on the Sculpture Garden. Wang Keping was born in Beijing and has lived in Paris since 1984. He is a founding member of The Stars (Xing Xing), often considered as the first avant-garde contemporary art movement in China. His work has been exhibited widely around the world, including at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Brooklyn Museum, New York; National Art Museum of China, Beijing.

John McDonald employs metal as a three-dimensional pencil by precisely bending metres and metres of slender steel rod into a conical vision. In his curvilinear Shongololo, contour, drawing and surface become one. 

The vertiginous stupa of this sculpture was inspired by the giant millipedes indigenous to South Africa and named in Swahili. Their bodies are comprised of multiple curving cylindrical segments, and the topological similarity in geometry is self-evident. It is a pleasing and elemental depiction of sculptural form, achieved through the concentric repetition of linear material. Its fabrication entirely by hand, rather than employing mechanical rollers bestows the sculpture with the inconsistencies of natural growth; completing its connection to the natural world.

On first appearance, Will Carr’s Transfiguration is a slender dash of pure geometry, that is until the wind raises, and its components are set in motion. His is a balletic dance of a sculpture, whose exact configuration is often in flux. Its graceful motion becomes hypnotic, as the viewer seeks repetition and pattern. And yet, the variables of wind speed and direction ensure the effects of gravity are rarely consistent as the sculpture appears to seek flight. This array of movements suggests purpose and function, achieved through components of the language of abstract sculpture.

The colour in Pete Rogers’ sculpture literally surfs in on a wave, a vibrant blue wave of richly transparent PVC in Surfing the Blue. Intriguingly, this sculpture casts a blue halo onto the surrounding ground which moves with the sun to further animate the sense of coastal motion.

A questioning of what things really are has been posed by the curvilinear carving installed by Giles Kent. The timbers of Mixed Hardwood Branches resemble giant forged iron tendrils, sometimes sinister and at other times more welcoming depending on the light penetrating the laurel tunnel. It is therefore a sculpture that is ambiguous in both content and materials.

Nick Horrigan’s giant wooden stacked spire Syntheses towers over viewers, yet also accommodates them within an internal cavern that appears to have brought the stars down from the skies. The architecturally ambiguous and dominating exterior contrasts the intimacy of its interior.

What the Artist Says:

“This sculptural installation investigates the synthesis of forms, processes, and materials through the product and by-products of the timber industry. It aims to question the ambiguous boundaries between suggested architectural forms, including church or antenna, office block or climbing frame. The use of optical fibres introduces solar energy as the pivotal heavenly body that connects these forms, materials, and processes; and more importantly defines our existence.”

Stop by the Garden Café for a freshly made barista coffee, light lunch, slice of homemade cake or to pick up a children’s lunch box. The perfect place to revive and refresh while visiting the Gardens.

Ladies, Gents, Disabled Toilets and Baby Change facilities located in the Garden Café courtyard. Exit the gardens via the Ticket Desk kiosks to access the toilets.

Level access available.

Serving soup, sandwiches and snacks to take away, as well as hot and cold drinks. Open to all visitors, The Muddy Mole can be accessed through the gate from the Sculpture Garden.

You'll find Ladies, Gents, Disabled Toilets and Baby Change facilities a short walk down the path from The Muddy Mole.

Level access available.

Step into the transformed historic gardens Burghley House, brought to life by Botanic Tapestry, an exciting outdoor art installation created by the artist duo Graphic Rewilding.

South Gardens 15 March - 21 April

Sculpture Garden 26 April - 31 August