Estella Castle is a New Zealand artist based in the South West of England. Her art practice connects museum collections with local communities through events, performances and exhibitions. Castle is the current artist-in-residence at Egham Museum. Her Egham Visions project draws on the museum’s collection to explore and reveal hidden stories. An interactive project with the local community is currently underway, with an upcoming exhibition due Feb 2021. In 2019 Castle won the Runnymede and Ankerwycke National Trust, People’s Landscape Commission. For this project she worked collaboratively with local historians, academics, community leaders and groups to create The People’s Pageant. This one-day performance commemorated the sealing of the Magna Carta on the original site. This was a vibrant reimagining of a 1930s pageant based on local stories and was performed solely by local amateur actors, including original set design, score and choreography. In 2019 Castle created No Shepherdess/No Pastoral in partnership with The Wallace Collection, The Victoria and Albert Collection, Hatchlands National Trust and Madame Tussauds. Soprano, Ellie McCormick and Composer Edward Ling joined Castle’s team to create a series of performances linking objects once owned by Marie Antoinette through an opera sung by Antoinette herself. Castle collaborated with artist Cat Auburn in 2016 to commemorate the 200th anniversary of John Constable’s time in Suffolk by recreating The Hay Wain at the original site the painting is based on. The first stage of the project consisted of a live public staging of the recreation, involving the local community. The second stage is a moving image artwork that uses footage from the event interwoven with archival colonial re-enactment imagery from New Zealand.
Estella Castle
The Egham Visions project, funded by the Arts Council of England, draws on Egham Museum’s John Hassell watercolour collection, painted in the 1820s, as a backdrop for exploring hidden stories. It will allow the museum to better interpret, catalogue and conserve these works, making them an accessible starting point for discussions and engagement.
The project includes a programme of, talks, workshops and activities and a performance in collaboration with movement director Sacha Plaige, where members from the community will be invited to participate and help shape what the final performance and exhibition should look like – what stories should we tell, how can we tell them, from whose perspective, and why is this important? We will do this through exploring endangered crafts, once prevalent in the Georgian period and linked to the Museums object collection, and are excited to be working with the Heritage Crafts Association. Further project partners and supporters are the Runnymede Access Liaison Group, VocalEyes, the Museum of English Rural Life, UCL’s Legacies of British Slave-ownership and Professor Hannah Thompson from Royal Holloway, University of London.
Keep up to date with this project and other news by following Egham Museum on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram and use #EghamVisions.
https://visions.eghammuseum.org/
2013 | MA Fine Art from City & Guilds of London Art School, London, UK |
2010 | Post Graduate Diploma in Visual Arts, Auckland University of Technology, NZ |
2006 | Bachelor of Visual Arts, Auckland University of Technology, NZ |
2003 | Certificate of Art and Design from Whitecliffe School of Art and Design, NZ |
2019 | No Shepherdess/No Pastoral, The Wallace Collection, London, UK |
2019 | The People’s Pageant, Runnymede, National Trust, Surrey, UK |
2016 | Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, (collaboration with Cat Auburn) Flatford Mill, National Trust, Suffolk, UK |
2015 | Society of Women Artists, Mall Galleries, London, UK |
2014 |
Lake Island, Degree Art Gallery, London, UK |
2013 |
Corner Window Gallery: Project 006: Estella Castle, NZ |
2017 | The River Lie, (Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay), The Suter Gallery, Nelson, NZ |
2016 | Post Landscape, (Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay), Bartley + Company Art, Wellington, NZ |
2016 | Private Spaces, The Literary and Philosophical Society, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK |
2015 | Campo Adentro, Federico García Lorca Centre, Granada, Spain |
2015 | Society of Women Artists, Mall Galleries, London, UK |
2014 | Lake Island, Residency, Degree Art Gallery, London, UK |
2013 | Group Show MA & Other Postgraduates, Atkinson Gallery, Somerset, UK |
2013 | Peckham Space, Peckham, London, UK |
2013 | M.A Show, City and Guilds Art School, London, UK |
2012 | Emergence, New Zealand Art Week, NZ |
2011 | Pop, Rob Garrett Fine Art, NZ |
2010 | Do You Mind, Collaboration with the Centre for Brain Research, NZ |
2019 | Alighieri, SS20 collection, London and Paris Fashion Week, Creative Producer |
2018 | Alexander McQueen, SS19 collection, Paris Fashion Week, Artist |
2019 | Royal Holloway, University of London, Surrey, UK |
2019 | The Wallace Collection, London, UK |
National Trust exhibition page for The People’s Pageant
Interview with Debbie McGee at BBC @ Radio Suffolk for The People’s Pageant
Two artists recreate one of Constable's best known paintings in the heart of Suffolk, ITV News, September 2017
National Trust exhibition page for ‘Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay’
Interview with Kate Prout at ITV NEWS, 2016
Interview with Lesley Dolphin at BBC @ Radio Suffolk for Ask the Fellows Who Cut the Hay, (interview at 1hr 41 mins) 2016
Radio NZ interview, August, 2016
BBC News feature - shared by the BBC on their Twitter page, 2016
Post-Landscape, March 2017
The Nautilus Revisited, 02 December, 2014
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