The great Cragside cover-up by Harriet Sutcliffe, Kate Stobbart and Rob Blazey

4,000 sunflowers planted on the lawn in the formal garden

The great Cragside cover-up is a collaboration of three creative visions combining art, music and sculpture, intended the re-focus the lens on female history at Cragside. The work tells an evocative story of female representation through four immersive installations at Cragside, running from 13 October - 4 November 2018.

The Cragside cover-up: garden (August-September) highlights the thousands of anonymous women who worked at both the Elswick Works and Cragside over the last one hundred years, through the planting of 4,000 sunflowers in the formal garden

The Cragside cover-up: sound (1 August-4 November) is an interactive sculptural sound piece. Powered by a solar panel on the back, this instrument breathes life and sound into the sunflower display through a synthesiser. Tap the sunflowers to make a tune

The Cragside cover-up: house (13 October-4 November) shines a light on female representation within the house by concealing male representation within the house. The work explores the way in which women are represented throughout history, encouraging us to notice the absence of the female voice

The Cragside cover-up: gestures (23 June-4 November) showcases a video that hints to the anonymous women of Cragside through their hand gestures

A visitor looks at the covered-up images in the house Play Video

About the innovators

Kate Stobbart is an artist from Newcastle upon Tyne, making work with short films, objects, text and live events. Her most recent rejections are from from the prestigious British School at Rome (2018), Axis Web Art Award (2017), and Artangel UK (2013). This is her first collaboration with Rob Blazey and Harriet Sutcliffe.
Harriet Sutcliffe is an artist and researcher, currently undertaking a practice-led PhD at Newcastle University investigating ‘The Significance of Space and Form In Art School Pedagogy’. Sutcliffe’s interdisciplinary practice encompasses, sculpture, site-specific installation, collage and drawing. She uses a multidisciplinary approach to question authenticity, authority and the politics of display.
Rob Blazey is a composer, instrument maker and performer undertaking a Creative Practice
PhD in music. By engaging with off-cuts and broken and unwanted objects as materials,
Blazey demonstrates how basic collage techniques such as fragmentation, repurposing
and recombination can form the basis of new approaches to musical creativity.

(L-R) Harriet Sutcliffe, Rob Blazey and Kate Stobbart
The artists chat round a table
(L-R) Harriet Sutcliffe, Rob Blazey and Kate Stobbart