It would be hard to beat Houghton Hall as a location for Myth, the monumental exhibition of works by Stephen Cox, RA, that opened on 4 May. The house and its park and gardens, created in the early 18th century for Sir Robert Walpole, offer a theatrical setting for this remarkable retrospective that includes works by Cox created over the past 40 years.
In an introductory essay in the exhibition catalogue, the Royal Academician Eric Parry quotes garden historian John Dixon Hunt: “Kent’s genius lay in the design and decoration of buildings and other structures that he invented for insertion into landscapes”. Parry comments “The same can be said of Cox”. The grandeur of Walpole’s house, now the home of the Marquess of Cholmondeley and his family, sets off the sense of scale – physical, historical, geographical – in Cox’s work.
Reverence
The impression I brought away from the press view at Houghton Hall was that Cox’s work is above all an expression of reverence. The catalogue opens with his words “For me art is a metaphor for the things that religion, as a domain, actually gives man – the spiritual.” The leaflet published for Cox’s 2011 exhibition in Ludlow Castle described his life as a “pilgrimage to the stone quarries of the ancients”. He seeks out particular varieties of stone – marble, alabaster, porphyry – and then works with those who are familiar with them. His inspiration is drawn from the cultural, artistic and spiritual context in which each stone belongs.
In talking about Myth, Cox said, “I work amongst diverse cultures and look for the imaginative which, like poetry, gives us ‘meaning’ without definition. We speculate on our origins, but we carry the answers in the very ‘matter’ of our being. In India, the ancient cycles of Hinduism are rendered with narratives elicited from stone, forming magical spectres, where dance initiates the beginning of Time and creatures in its thrall. From the geology of ancient Egypt, we see ‘drawing’, in intractable mediums, the creation that describes the architecture of our Earth floating in the star-struck heavens.”
‘He has a feeling for the holy‘
Richard Dorment used these words writing about Cox’s stunning altar and altarpiece in St Paul’s Harringay. Cox has also famously created the exquisite St Anselm’s altar in Canterbury Cathedral, but as Dorment points out, much of his better-known work is focused on the spirituality of Southern India.
Cox first visited the Tamil Nadu region in 1985, having been invited by the British Council to go there in order to create work that would represent Britain in the 1986 Indian Triennale. He set up a studio in Mahabalipuram, just south of Chennai, where he worked with and was inspired by Indian sculptors who are in the direct line of descent, both genealogically and artistically, from the 7th-century creators of the Dharmaraja Ratha temples and Arjuna’s Penance. He won a gold medal at the Triennale, and decided to set up a studio in Tamil Nadu to work on the hard local igneous stone he finds so rewarding. He has been working with the local artists there now for 40 years.
Sacrifice and libations
Cox’s striking Yoginis (2000–2010) are set in a clearing in the Houghton woodland. These female figures, derived from a tantric cult, are human forms with animal heads in black Indian stone. They are beautiful yet threatening, demanding sacrifice. They are arranged at Houghton in the form of the circular open-air temples associated with them.
The sensuous and androgynous forms of the Yoginis are echoed in the delicacy of works displayed inside Houghton Hall, such as the porphyry Figure: Deposition (2018). In his reverential approach to his materials, he has adopted the Indian practice of pouring libations on the stone as it is worked. Libation bowls, such as Porphyry Cluster (2010), are smaller than many of his creations, but are important to Cox – he writes that they “have a symbolism in the interface between the everyday object and the spiritual, between the secular and the ‘transcendent’.”
Egypt
In 1989 Cox was commissioned to create a work for the Cairo Opera House. This led to a new pilgrimage destination, the eastern mountains of Egypt, and the quarries at Mons Porphyrites, the only source of imperial porphyry. It’s the world’s hardest, rarest and most prized stone. The quarries were discovered in AD18 by Caius Cominus Leugas and one can still see marks created by the Romans working the quarry. The stone is purple – it draws its name from the Greek for ‘purple’ – and was used for sarcophagi and busts of emperors, and to line the Imperial Roman birthing chamber (hence “born in the purple”).
The scene in the Stone Hall, shown in the headline image, creates an overpowering sense of the sweep of history: the sculptor sitting with his work in a classical setting, displaying works in a stone worked by the Romans and before them by the Egyptians.
Revering the stone
Many of the pieces I personally found most striking display a senses of veneration for the stone itself and the complex history and geology it embodies. Two monumental polished sarcophagi, entitled Interior Space: For Cheops and Interior Space: For Kephren (2021), in Aswan granite, are inspired but the builders of the two greatest pyramids of Egypt. In 2024 For Kephren stood on the axis of Kephren’s pyramid on the plain of Giza before being brought to Houghton.
Kephren stipulated that his funerary statues should be made in a stone that had never before been used to create a statue, and never would be again. The stone used for his funerary statue is known as Kephren diorite. Cox’s pays homage to this unique stone in the polished Disc of Kephren (1994–95) displayed in Houghton Hall.
Cox’s Gilgamesh and Enkidu (2024) and Interior Space: Shrine (a Porphyra) (2000) both display his ability to see and reveal form and design within the geology of the stone itself. The paired highly polished surfaces reflect his recurring theme, ‘Gemini’. Many of his works are paired: the Gemini Basins (2019) in Imperial Porphyry, would make a whole if fitted together.
Myth is organised by the Houghton Arts Foundation, supported by the Rothschild Foundation and with key assistance from the artist. It is open until Sunday 28 September. Tickets can be booked via the Houghton Hall website.
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