English Heritage’s first visual art fellow Ingrid Pollard staging new exhibition at Belsay Hall

Opening at Belsay Hall and Quarry Gardens tomorrow (Saturday), There is Light in the Fissures is part of the charity’s creative programme.

Ingrid has created a series of interventions and installations, drawing on her year-long fellowship at the historic site, that explore the landscape and the layers of history that it would have witnessed.

These include her intricately designed paper fragments that cover the torn wallpaper in Belsay Hall’s bedrooms and to the clandestine mirrors that hide in plain sight within the Quarry Gardens.

There is a particular focus on the sandstone from which the hall and quarry were made.

Ropes secured to the towering pillars that line Belsay’s impressive Greek revival hall will cradle a huge stone segment, found within the grounds. Suspended at half a metre, this large-scale installation will dominate the space.

Ingrid said: “The prospect of working at Belsay Hall was tantalising from the very beginning.

“Its almost magical landscape led me down the pathways of sound, magic and performance, and I found myself excited by the idea of bringing parts of this wonderland inside.”

The fellowship and resulting exhibition is in partnership with Newcastle University supported by Bartlett Endowment funding and forms part of English Heritage’s new national creative programme, which aims to produce outstanding artistic responses by contemporary artists to the historic sites and collections within the charity’s care.