Commissions
People We Love, at Castle Howard
10:00am - 4:00pm
Castle Howard
Castle Howard, Castle Howard, York, UK
Included in ticket price for house entry
Beautiful, moving and timely, People We Love explores the invisible transaction between a person, a piece of art and that emotion which bonds us all. Love.
For this latest edition, set in the Chapel at Castle Howard, multiple high definition screens will show a portrait of a local resident or visitor. Each person is gazing at a picture of someone they love. A picture you never see. We feel each unspoken story as the faces tell the tale of a person they love.
This community inspired artwork, created by artist Kit Monkman (KMA) began its life in York in 2020 and has since toured internationally (Pittsburgh, USA and Viborg, Denmark) as well as a recent new edition for Selby Abbey.
Now, for this new edition at Castle Howard, we celebrate local residents and visitors to the estate as well as presenting portraiture for the digital age alongside the grandeur and collections for which this beautiful treasure house is renowned.
Viewers of People We Love will meet the penetrating gaze of the work’s subjects, never knowing who the focus of their detailed attention is. In the most direct sense, the aesthetic subjects of the installation, i.e. the people we love, are absent, and can only be conjured into existence through an act of imagination on the viewer’s behalf. The work turns on this notion, the notion that love and empathy start as an act of imagination. Kit Monkman from KMA explores this further in his blog An Invisible Transaction of Love.
People We Love finds its inspiration in the book The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne. First published in York in 1759, the book contains a blank page for the reader to imagine, draw or write about a person they love.
To learn more about how this ground-breaking book inspired People We Love read The Blank Page.