Chamber of Dreams by Ian Kirkpatrick
In January 2025, the Landmark Trust commissioned two professional artists to each create a piece of work inspired in some way by the Painted Chamber at Calverley Old Hall.
This commission was a way of us being able to share these incredible sixteenth-century wall paintings which form part of the Calverley Old Hall holiday let more widely, giving visitors to the Community Space the opportunity to reflect and feel inspired by the artwork on display.
Hear from artist Ian Kirkpatrick as he explains the inspiration behind his piece and shares his artistic process of creating her work, ‘Chamber of Dreams’.
Find out more about the other commissioned artwork here - ‘The Unknown Artist’ by Georgina Davy.
Chamber of Dreams by Ian Kirkpatrick
The idea for “Chamber of Dreams” was inspired by the poem Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The subtitle to his poem is “A Vision in a Dream. A Fragment” – which feels like a perfect metaphor for what you see in the Painted Chamber. The artwork in the Chamber is so old that some of it has vanished - leaving behind only fragments of the original design. And of course, being a bedroom, the Chamber will be filled with the dreams of those who sleep within it. To me, the whole room felt dreamlike when I visited it – covered from top to bottom in dragons, monsters and mysterious people. I wanted to capture that dreamlike feeling by depicting two people sleeping in the room beneath surreal creatures swirling above them, as if in their fantasies.
I also wanted to capture the essence of “grotesque” art, which is the style of the Painted Chamber. Grotesque art gets its name from the wall paintings in the grotto of Roman emperor Nero (the word means “grotto-esque”), and then it became fashionable again in the Renaissance. The Painted Chamber is very ornate and filled with strange creatures and patterns, much like my own work - so I felt an immediate kinship with the Chamber when I first visited it. I wanted to create my own response using similar colour tones and materials (i.e. paint on wood), but with a modern twist. If you look in my artwork, you’ll find lots of references to Calverley Old Hall – including its architecture, its history, and the many pieces of historic furniture inside of it. Some of these references are from ancient times – while others are nods to present-day Calverley. Hopefully people who look at my artwork can discover images that they recognise from inside and outside the Old Hall – and maybe learn something new about its fascinating story.
The process
I designed the artwork using a combination of hand-made and digital processes. I started by researching Calverley Old Hall and sketching ideas onto paper – then I scanned these sketches and cleaned them up digitally on my iPad. After that I imported the designs into Adobe Illustrator, where I was able to arrange them into a meaningful layout. I printed the finished design at full size onto paper, then used white ‘carbon transfer paper’ to trace the design onto the black stained wood panel.
I then used Frisket film – basically a thin sticky plastic that you can cut with a scalpel to create stencils – to mask the icons and paint them onto the wood using white and gold paint. And finally, I used a small brush to clean up the edges with black paint.
The artwork was transported in two halves from London (where I live) to Calverley – then it was glued and screwed together – and hung on the wall in the Community Space.
I hope that the artwork is a meaningful addition to Calverley Old Hall. It’s been an honour to have been selected to contribute to its long history, stretching back more than 500 years.
