Matlock artist creates new sculpture at Chatsworth

Created from more than 100 tonnes of local stone, Natural Course is made up of tens of thousands of individual, hand placed pieces using a traditional dry-stone walling method.

The artist, Matlock-based Laura Ellen Bacon, designed the sculpture and worked with a small team of local dry stone wallers to build it in a previously undeveloped, 15-acre area called Arcadia.

Natural Course was assembled by coordination of hand and eye to give the great mass of stone a sense of slow, gradual movement over the land, suggesting an innate life force to the hard and seemingly motionless stone.

Usually working in wood, often willow, Laura Ellen Bacon is best known for creating large-scale organic forms but this was her first major commission in stone.

Natural Course will join more than 20 sculptural works in the Chatsworth garden by post war masters including Antony Gormley, Angela Conner, Elisabeth Frink, Allen Jones, Michael Craig-Martin and Barry Flanagan.

Situated in woodland between two glades in the Arcadia area, new paths surround the sculpture and have been laid by the garden team using quarry spoil.

The area is punctuated by several newly planted Davidia or ‘Ghost Tree’, which are under planted with thousands of flowering perennials.

The Duke of Devonshire said: “We were keen on a new sculpture for the garden that strongly evoked both Chatsworth itself and the Derbyshire landscape from which it was born so I visited Laura at her studio in Cromford and we talked about how this might be achieved.

"We gave her the freedom to explore the garden and develop her vision for the location, the materials used, and the sculptural form.

"The use of local stone and the dry stone walling method roots Natural Course in its environment and surroundings and its innovative construction is in keeping with the radical approach taken by so many of the other artists whose works can be seen in the garden today.”

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