Despite appearances, Newstead's history isn't all about the scandalous activities of Lord Byron. The truth is that the Abbey had been around for a fair few centuries before Byron arrived on the scene, and even when he did, he spent remarkably little of his time there, mostly preferring to live in Venice, Geneva and a host of other places instead.
So it's refreshing to see that, while Byron does get the occasional nod in Tristram Aver's And stand a ruin amidst ruins, the piece currently displayed in the Great Drawing Room at Newstead Abbey, he's far from the only point of interest. He gets a look-in with the title – it coming from Byron's own wry description of his ruined self inhabiting the semi-derelict house he inherited in 1798.
Newstead's longer history goes back to 1170, when it was first founded as an Augustinian priory, but the buildings and grounds have since been through more reboots than Star Trek, Bowie and Madonna combined. It was confiscated from the Church by Henry VIII in 1540 and sold to the Byron family, after which it embarked on a rollercoaster ride of extensions, redevelopments and, at one point, just before the best known Lord Byron got hold of it, deliberate near-ruin at the hands of vindictive relatives.
But it's the more recent history of Victorian Newstead that Aver's paintings seem most interested in. The features we see today – the decorative wallpapers and furniture – all date from the residences of Thomas Wildman after 1815, and William Frederick Webb, who bought the house in 1861, and their stories help to tell us how places like Newstead Abbey worked economically and socially. Wildman’s money had been made from Jamaican plantations, while Webb was a noted African explorer. From this, it's clear that Newstead has roots that tangle with histories of slavery and empire.
Many of the images layered into Aver’s paintings seem carefully chosen to expose some of this history. The golden pheasant and Indian blue peacock, for example, are both highly prized ornamental birds – but both are territorial and frequently aggressive species brought to English estates from Asia. Aver noticed them everywhere at Newstead, not just as live birds in the grounds, but on wallpapers, fabrics and carvings all over the house, so they naturally take centre stage in the paintings.
The group of three linked panels presented as a free-standing screen with perspex extensions and stag skulls, show a relish for the fine details of often overlooked eighteenth and nineteenth century painting types that's unusual in a contemporary artist. But despite its layers of painted peacocks and pheasants, dogs, local landscapes and wallpaper patterns, all referring to the layers of Newstead's history, And stand a ruin amidst ruins also relates to Aver's earliest interests as a painter.
Back in 2003, Aver was responsible for the atmospheric, abstract record covers of music press favourites of the time, Cooper Temple Clause, including their debut LP, Kick Up The Fire and Let The Flames Break Loose. For many years afterwards, Aver focused on making paintings that referenced the distinctive appearances of digital screens. Full of painted pixels, science-fiction robots and detailed, hand-made Photoshop effects, these early paintings seemed to be exploring a world that exists at one move from reality.
After 2010, other kinds of imagery began to appear in Aver's colourful digital mash-ups, notably dogs, explosions, flowers and stags. These historical fragments might have been partly inspired by a day job at Nottingham Castle, where Aver saw the kinds of paintings he was referring to in his own every day. A series of oval canvases, framed in neon and inspired by an 1847 painting of a stag brought down by hunting dogs by Richard Andsell, The Chase, and these new paintings put pillar boxes, flags and riot police, hunting dogs and horses, staffies and English bull terriers, at centre stage.
These paintings also merged tranquil flowers and trees with explosions, whose shapes, Aver noted, as seen in news photos from Gaza and Afghanistan, seemed to echo each other, “Maybe I was thinking about how the British landscape and countryside might be seen as something lush, green and idyllic, whereas in parts it is actually something struggling, polluted by industry and intensive farming, and driven by class… I'd been wary of making political statements but maybe with The Chase I found ways of dealing with this.”
Perhaps the paintings at Newstead, too, whose images seem to reference nothing outside the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are current because economic inequalities in those eras and our own are becoming increasingly similar. But with a bit of close attention, plenty of other parallels with our own day are right there to be found. Celebrity culture is seen in a copy of Byron's pin-up of 'Gentleman' John Jackson, boxing champion of England in 1795, and very much the Carl Froch of his era.
Then there's the whole area of 'pimping' and 'bling' in general, a point that Aver makes clearly, and not without a bit of wry humour, in his provocative use of pink neon tubing as a stand-in for the excess of a traditional gold picture-frame. So despite the apparent turn to historical imagery, Aver's new work still has one foot firmly planted in the present, in the world of the internet and digital images.
Another of Aver's Byronic titles hints at this. An exhibition at Lakeside last year was called There is a pleasure in these pathless woods, referencing the opening stanza of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the poem that first made Byron a celebrity in 1812. It could certainly be argued that Byron's image of those 'pathless woods' might be taken as a metaphor for the digital world itself, a place with few reliable maps and infinite potential, much like the mountains and forests of Byron's own day. There are also plenty of similarities to be noted between current activities like digital sampling and the ways in which design and culture was mixed and changed by events like The Great Exhibition, held at Crystal Palace in 1851.
It's not even a massive stretch to see the eighteenth century Grand Tour, of the sort Byron indulged in for most of his life, as a kind of aristocratic prototype for Ryanair. It was, at any rate, a massive explosion in tourism, as wealthy travellers went all over Europe looking for souvenirs and fresh ideas about how to decorate their great houses and gardens. You could say that the interiors at Newstead and other country houses were like Instagram feeds for aristocrats and the new rich - their homes stages for their tastes and status to be displayed to their peers. So even while And stand a ruin amidst ruins is deeply rooted in Newstead and its complex history, Aver joins up the dots linking then and now in subtle but often surprising ways.
And stand a ruin amidst ruins runs until Sunday 5 July, Great Drawing Room, Newstead Abbey.
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