“When we first moved here, I was absolutely bored rigid, I couldn’t bear it,” says Nicky Wilson, the co-founder with her husband Robert of the sculpture park Jupiter Artland. The 100-acre site just outside Edinburgh, now celebrating its 10th anniversary, comprises their Jacobean manor home and artworks from 24 contemporary artists in their collection, as well as indoor exhibition space.
The family arrived there 19 years ago, “with babes popping out everywhere,” says Wilson, after years of living together in a terraced London house. She had been a sculptor before having children, and moving to what felt like the middle of nowhere was a shock to the system.
“Jupiter came out of a fallow period in my life where I didn’t know what to do with myself,” says Wilson. The house they moved to was fairly derelict and the land around was wild and boggy.
What came out of that situation was the couple’s idea to create a sculpture park. She cites two particular influences on its formation. The first is Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, the art garden that the Scottish poet, writer and artist created in 1983. The garden is just half an hour’s drive from Jupiter Artland. The second is the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, which was started in 1989 in Dumfriesshire by Charles Jencks, the cultural theorist, landscape designer and co-founder of Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres.
So, in all the chaos of having two toddlers with another child on the way, and being stranded in a big house, how exactly was Jupiter Artland born?
“My husband just said, ‘let’s phone up Charles Jencks and see what he can do.’ So, we looked him up in the Yellow Pages and he said that he would pop by on his way back from America.”
Jencks did pop by and in 2008 the first work at Jupiter Artland was completed: Cells of Life, the beautifully sculpted turf mounds, with sculpture and lakes interspersed, that have become an icon of the sculpture park.
“He said yes, because that’s what he’s like – he’s a polymath and a generous, generous human being,” Wilson says. “He just took a punt and said: ‘You guys are mad, but I’m going to go along with it.’”
Wilson speaks of the sculpture park maternally – “it’s like a child of ours”. Jencks has even nicknamed her the midwife of contemporary art, a title that Wilson is quite fond of. The process of commissioning art certainly sounds a nurturing one.
“As an artist, I have great sympathy for the difficulties of making work for outside,” she says. “We want each commission to be what the artist wants it to be and we’re happy to let it evolve into alien territory. All the work is contemporary, all the work is new and by artists that resonate with us on quite a deep level. Commissioning should be like that – lyrical and rather beautiful.”
From that, you might think commissioning work is a hands-off process for the Wilsons, but both of them have mucked in a lot over the years.
“One of the Cells of Life mounds, Jencks called Robert’s Mound because he laid all the turf,” Wilson says. “And I had a great time helping out Anya Gallaccio and her assistant placing all the amethysts in her grotto, The Light Pours Out of Me.”
Gallaccio’s work and all its 23 tonnes of amethyst was installed some years ago, but what’s new for Jupiter’s 10th anniversary?
There are two new commissions opening this year by sculptors Phyllida Barlow and Ollie Dook, and an exhibition of work by Joana Vasconcelos, as well as a 10th anniversary hardback book, The Generous Landscape: Ten Years of Jupiter Artland, to be published in July.
The Barlow and Vasoconcelos both open on 12 May for the summer season that Jupiter Artland opens for annually, until 30 September. The park closes for winter.
Another initiative this year is the new Pay What You Want Mondays scheme, which Wilson hopes will attract more visitors, including those who can’t afford the entrance fee. Tickets usually cost £8.50 for adults and £4.50 for children.
Blue sky thinking
For the 10th anniversary, Wilson emphasises the park’s strong focus on education.
“We want to engage with every child in Scotland,” she says. “I’d like it to be Britain, but we’re going to start with Scotland. which has 695,000 schoolchildren. So far, we’ve calculated that 3% of them have visited us,” she says. “As I counted I thought, ‘god, that’s not very much’. But actually, it’s quite a lot if you think about it.”
If you actually do calculate it, nearly 21,000 schoolchildren have visited the park so far. “I mean, it’s a lot really, for a little place like this,” she says. “We’ve only got 97% to go, but once you start tackling it and start pulling it together, of course it’s possible. I’m bloody well going to do it.”
There are also whisperings of a new community engagement programme, titled Orbit, that will launch this September, but Wilson doesn’t give anything away about it. No doubt it will have grand ambition though, like everything the Wilsons do.
Learning curves
She says the management of the park is probably about three quarters down to her, with Robert doing the rest.
“He’s very good at management overview, which I’ve never been very good at, and I’m good at the vision,” she says.
Robert Wilson is also the chairman and co-owner of Nelsons, the UK’s largest natural medicines producer, and has recently been appointed as the chair of Creative Scotland. In short, he’s involved with every big decision, funds the park with his work, while she oversees the day-to-day.
“It’s bonkers,” she says. “I mean, I don’t know how I’ve managed to persuade my husband to do this. But he is as committed as I am, and I just think that something weird happened in our marriage where we don’t even think about it anymore. We breathe Jupiter.”
Wilson tends to play down her career in between being an artist and setting Jupiter Artland up, but she does mention that she has worked in advertising, hat manufacturing and a skincare company for pregnant women, so her skills aren’t narrow. However, she had never been a manager before her work at the sculpture park.
“I’d never managed people before – I’m still learning about management,” she says. “I wasn’t very good at accounts, and I can do that now. I knew nothing about shops, I’m now alright on that. And I’d never really commissioned sculpture before, I’d only ever made it.”
Jupiter Artland is imbued with ambition and big ideas that seem insurmountable at the beginning. Wilson makes things happen, whether it’s starting a business, commissioning monumental artworks or engaging Scotland’s schoolchildren through contemporary art.
“The only reason Robert and I do what we do is because we have been inspired, and unless you give people opportunity to be inspired, their lives don’t change, and my life changed,” she says. “Let’s work together to give kids a great life. Let’s open that up, let’s make their eyes shine.”
She mentions that some visitors have asked to sprinkle ashes there, testament to how art has changed their loved ones’ lives and the private, magic moments Jupiter embodies for many visitors.
But the burning question remains, why call it Jupiter? “The name has an esoteric side to it, but we thought this place needed to be named after a god, so Jupiter it became,” she says. “Jupiter was the god of play and partying and fun and exuberance and joy, but with a fundamental strength. He also spawned a lot of children.” (The Wilsons have five kids.)
“I couldn’t believe that people would actually visit, and that it would catch on, but it has. The eccentricity and the warm-heartedness of this place is really important.”
Ten years on, she’s still in mild disbelief of all that has been achieved at Jupiter Artland and can’t wait to get stuck into the next decade.
Wilson trained as an artist at Camberwell College of Fine Art in London, and after an MA in sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art, she won the prestigious year-long British School of Rome Sculpture Scholarship.
She founded and directed the skincare company Beautiful Bump and has also worked in advertising.
She used to be on the board of Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. She currently sits on the board of trustees for the National Galleries of Scotland, and is the chair of the Hopetoun Foundation.
She has five children with husband Robert Wilson, the other co-founder of Jupiter Artland.
The park was nominated as a finalist for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2016 prize.
Entirely privately funded, it is a charitable foundation that commissions art for public benefit. Revenue from ticket sales go towards building the education programme.
Since opening, more than 340,000 people have visited. In 2017 visitor figures reached 85,000.
There are about 15 full-time equivalent staff members, and volunteer numbers fluctuate during the year as Jupiter Artland only opens from May to September.
The family arrived there 19 years ago, “with babes popping out everywhere,” says Wilson, after years of living together in a terraced London house. She had been a sculptor before having children, and moving to what felt like the middle of nowhere was a shock to the system.
“Jupiter came out of a fallow period in my life where I didn’t know what to do with myself,” says Wilson. The house they moved to was fairly derelict and the land around was wild and boggy.
What came out of that situation was the couple’s idea to create a sculpture park. She cites two particular influences on its formation. The first is Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Little Sparta, the art garden that the Scottish poet, writer and artist created in 1983. The garden is just half an hour’s drive from Jupiter Artland. The second is the Garden of Cosmic Speculation, which was started in 1989 in Dumfriesshire by Charles Jencks, the cultural theorist, landscape designer and co-founder of Maggie’s Cancer Care Centres.
So, in all the chaos of having two toddlers with another child on the way, and being stranded in a big house, how exactly was Jupiter Artland born?
“My husband just said, ‘let’s phone up Charles Jencks and see what he can do.’ So, we looked him up in the Yellow Pages and he said that he would pop by on his way back from America.”
Jencks did pop by and in 2008 the first work at Jupiter Artland was completed: Cells of Life, the beautifully sculpted turf mounds, with sculpture and lakes interspersed, that have become an icon of the sculpture park.
“He said yes, because that’s what he’s like – he’s a polymath and a generous, generous human being,” Wilson says. “He just took a punt and said: ‘You guys are mad, but I’m going to go along with it.’”
Wilson speaks of the sculpture park maternally – “it’s like a child of ours”. Jencks has even nicknamed her the midwife of contemporary art, a title that Wilson is quite fond of. The process of commissioning art certainly sounds a nurturing one.
“As an artist, I have great sympathy for the difficulties of making work for outside,” she says. “We want each commission to be what the artist wants it to be and we’re happy to let it evolve into alien territory. All the work is contemporary, all the work is new and by artists that resonate with us on quite a deep level. Commissioning should be like that – lyrical and rather beautiful.”
From that, you might think commissioning work is a hands-off process for the Wilsons, but both of them have mucked in a lot over the years.
“One of the Cells of Life mounds, Jencks called Robert’s Mound because he laid all the turf,” Wilson says. “And I had a great time helping out Anya Gallaccio and her assistant placing all the amethysts in her grotto, The Light Pours Out of Me.”
Gallaccio’s work and all its 23 tonnes of amethyst was installed some years ago, but what’s new for Jupiter’s 10th anniversary?
There are two new commissions opening this year by sculptors Phyllida Barlow and Ollie Dook, and an exhibition of work by Joana Vasconcelos, as well as a 10th anniversary hardback book, The Generous Landscape: Ten Years of Jupiter Artland, to be published in July.
The Barlow and Vasoconcelos both open on 12 May for the summer season that Jupiter Artland opens for annually, until 30 September. The park closes for winter.
Another initiative this year is the new Pay What You Want Mondays scheme, which Wilson hopes will attract more visitors, including those who can’t afford the entrance fee. Tickets usually cost £8.50 for adults and £4.50 for children.
Blue sky thinking
For the 10th anniversary, Wilson emphasises the park’s strong focus on education.
“We want to engage with every child in Scotland,” she says. “I’d like it to be Britain, but we’re going to start with Scotland. which has 695,000 schoolchildren. So far, we’ve calculated that 3% of them have visited us,” she says. “As I counted I thought, ‘god, that’s not very much’. But actually, it’s quite a lot if you think about it.”
If you actually do calculate it, nearly 21,000 schoolchildren have visited the park so far. “I mean, it’s a lot really, for a little place like this,” she says. “We’ve only got 97% to go, but once you start tackling it and start pulling it together, of course it’s possible. I’m bloody well going to do it.”
There are also whisperings of a new community engagement programme, titled Orbit, that will launch this September, but Wilson doesn’t give anything away about it. No doubt it will have grand ambition though, like everything the Wilsons do.
Learning curves
She says the management of the park is probably about three quarters down to her, with Robert doing the rest.
“He’s very good at management overview, which I’ve never been very good at, and I’m good at the vision,” she says.
Robert Wilson is also the chairman and co-owner of Nelsons, the UK’s largest natural medicines producer, and has recently been appointed as the chair of Creative Scotland. In short, he’s involved with every big decision, funds the park with his work, while she oversees the day-to-day.
“It’s bonkers,” she says. “I mean, I don’t know how I’ve managed to persuade my husband to do this. But he is as committed as I am, and I just think that something weird happened in our marriage where we don’t even think about it anymore. We breathe Jupiter.”
Wilson tends to play down her career in between being an artist and setting Jupiter Artland up, but she does mention that she has worked in advertising, hat manufacturing and a skincare company for pregnant women, so her skills aren’t narrow. However, she had never been a manager before her work at the sculpture park.
“I’d never managed people before – I’m still learning about management,” she says. “I wasn’t very good at accounts, and I can do that now. I knew nothing about shops, I’m now alright on that. And I’d never really commissioned sculpture before, I’d only ever made it.”
Jupiter Artland is imbued with ambition and big ideas that seem insurmountable at the beginning. Wilson makes things happen, whether it’s starting a business, commissioning monumental artworks or engaging Scotland’s schoolchildren through contemporary art.
“The only reason Robert and I do what we do is because we have been inspired, and unless you give people opportunity to be inspired, their lives don’t change, and my life changed,” she says. “Let’s work together to give kids a great life. Let’s open that up, let’s make their eyes shine.”
She mentions that some visitors have asked to sprinkle ashes there, testament to how art has changed their loved ones’ lives and the private, magic moments Jupiter embodies for many visitors.
But the burning question remains, why call it Jupiter? “The name has an esoteric side to it, but we thought this place needed to be named after a god, so Jupiter it became,” she says. “Jupiter was the god of play and partying and fun and exuberance and joy, but with a fundamental strength. He also spawned a lot of children.” (The Wilsons have five kids.)
“I couldn’t believe that people would actually visit, and that it would catch on, but it has. The eccentricity and the warm-heartedness of this place is really important.”
Ten years on, she’s still in mild disbelief of all that has been achieved at Jupiter Artland and can’t wait to get stuck into the next decade.
Nicky Wilson at a glance
Nicky Wilson is the co-founder and director of Jupiter Artland sculpture park near Edinburgh, which opened in 2008.Wilson trained as an artist at Camberwell College of Fine Art in London, and after an MA in sculpture at the Chelsea School of Art, she won the prestigious year-long British School of Rome Sculpture Scholarship.
She founded and directed the skincare company Beautiful Bump and has also worked in advertising.
She used to be on the board of Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Gallery. She currently sits on the board of trustees for the National Galleries of Scotland, and is the chair of the Hopetoun Foundation.
She has five children with husband Robert Wilson, the other co-founder of Jupiter Artland.
Jupiter Artland at a glance
Jupiter Artland is a sculpture park near Edinburgh that opened in 2008.The park was nominated as a finalist for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year 2016 prize.
Entirely privately funded, it is a charitable foundation that commissions art for public benefit. Revenue from ticket sales go towards building the education programme.
Since opening, more than 340,000 people have visited. In 2017 visitor figures reached 85,000.
There are about 15 full-time equivalent staff members, and volunteer numbers fluctuate during the year as Jupiter Artland only opens from May to September.