Ashley Court Artists at Devon Open Studios

Ashley Court is a privately owned Regency country house and walled kitchen garden bordering the River Exe. This atmospheric property remains largely unaltered since the early 1800’s. This year, for the first time, visitors are invited to experience the house and garden as part of Devon Open Studios.

Sam Photic’s land art piece slides horizontally into view as you make your way up the drive. Outside the house Andy Lendzion’s stunning pair of frisky bronze horses will be transformed into mythical unicorns as part of a Devon Open Studios workshop.

Inside, Mark Entwisle’s paintings perfectly capture the atmosphere and textures of the house’s interiors, they are displayed in the main hall. Here you will also find ceramics by master potter Jacob Bodilly. Visitors can also see Jacob at work in his studio in the Old Tack Room of Ashley Court’s stable block.

Stephanie Buttle draws a thread from Tiverton’s textile history as she invites you to step into the drawing room with her installation work ‘The Inside Outside’ that moves in a procession from the formality of the house itself, out through its gardens and into its hinterlands, where an older Ashley Court once stood. Ashley Court was Zoe Jones’ childhood home for 8 years and her work is infused with the presence of the house, its gardens and grounds.

The idea for curating an exhibition of work referencing or directly related to Ashley Court arose when Tara Fraser (owner, with her partner Nigel Jones) took a trip to explore her hitherto unknown family connections with the Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne.

Heide was the home of influential Australian art collectors and patrons, John and Sunday Reed, from the mid 1930s through to their deaths in 1981. Ashey Court bears more than a passing resemblance to Heide, a substantial Victorian house on the banks of the Yarra river, with around 20 acres of land and gardens.

Tara’s father (Leslie Stack, d.1976) was a close friend of the Reed’s and lived and worked at Heide in the 1960s. Following her visit to Melbourne in 2024, she reflected that she had ‘unwittingly replicated something of that place in this one’ and felt inspired to explore further the idea of inviting contemporary artists to create works in response to the house and surrounding landscape at Ashley Court, just as the Reeds had done at Heide.