Nicky Wilson on Jupiter+Nation: 'It’s all about creating a slightly Alice In Wonderland kind of perspective'
On the outskirts of Edinburgh, Jupiter Artland sculpture park is a thrilling and acclaimed outpost of the city’s art scene. But with their Jupiter+Nation programme, they’re now bringing contemporary art to high streets and town centres across the country. Zara Janjua chats to founder Nicky Wilson and artist Lindsey Mendick to find out more about the ambitious concept
It started with a derelict Jacobean house, 50 acres of ‘useless’ farmland and a digger Nicky Wilson thought she might need for a fortnight. Before long there were five children, five dogs, chickens, doves, a pony and some of the world’s most important contemporary artists wandering around the garden.
Today, that slightly bonkers experiment is Jupiter Artland: the internationally renowned sculpture park and arts organisation hidden in the foothills of the Pentlands, west of Edinburgh. What began as Nicky and Robert Wilson’s family home has become a registered charity with a board, a major collection of permanent commissioned artworks and a learning programme that has engaged more than 100,000 young people over the past 18 years.
Arriving at Jupiter is intentionally unlike entering an austere cultural institution. Wilson believes traditional gallery architecture can intimidate people before they encounter a single artwork. Here, you drive through strange steel gates and emerge into what she gleefully calls a ‘Teletubby magical land’. There are tiny sheep and oversized horses; glimpses of Christian Boltanski’s ‘Animitas’ twinkling in the distance and Marc Quinn’s ‘Love Bomb’; and permanent commissions sitting within a landscape shaped by both agriculture and West Lothian’s post-industrial past. ‘It’s all about creating a slightly Alice In Wonderland kind of perspective,’ Wilsons says.
That sense of surprise has attracted artists including James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy, Jim Lambie, Nathan Coley and Anya Gallaccio, alongside generations of emerging Scottish artists. But the collection was never the endpoint. Education has become, in Wilson’s words, ‘the main drive of why we exist’. Visitors pay admission partly because she wants ‘everybody to be a philanthropist’, with that income helping support learning programmes.
Yet after years of working with schools, another problem became impossible to ignore: geography. A child in the Lothians could experience Jupiter Artland. For many in Dundee, Perth, Paisley or Dumfries, the cost and time involved in getting there made that impossible. ‘So that’s why we go to them,’ states Wilson. Jupiter+ launched in Perth in 2022, taking ambitious contemporary art into vacant high-street units. Across Perth, Ayr, Paisley and Dundee, it has attracted more than 20,000 visitors and directly engaged 2500 learners. Now, reimagined as Jupiter+ Nation, the programme begins its national chapter in Dumfries.
There is something beautifully circular about it. The Wilsons began by opening their home to strangers; now Jupiter is taking something of that home, its art, hospitality, curiosity and belief in possibility, beyond its own gates. Its latest vehicle is Lindsey Mendick’s ‘Growing Pains’, a surreal estate agency installed in an empty unit at Dumfries’ Loreburne Shopping Centre. Eight ceramic dollhouses spill out the anxieties and paraphernalia of adolescence: braces, spot cream, razors, trainers, phones and booze.
Behind the playfulness is something considerably more painful. Mendick grew up in Muswell Hill in north London and had a difficult time at school, eventually overdosing as a teenager. ‘It’s this moment where you’re not quite fitting into your body,’ she says of adolescence. ‘You just feel deeply uncomfortable. You don’t know who you are. You don’t know that life gets better.’
Mendick says the commission allowed her to be ‘more experimental, to create weirder things’ than the commercial art world necessarily permits. More significantly, despite making numerous exhibitions, she had never explored this period of her childhood before. Jupiter created, she says, ‘the perfect place to hold this story’.
That seems to encapsulate the organisation’s dual purpose: giving artists room to take risks while putting the resulting work in front of people who might never walk into a gallery. Wilson says Mendick ‘speaks absolutely unvarnished truth’ and that young people encountering her work ‘feel seen’. Mendick, meanwhile, describes Jupiter as a ‘one-in-a-million sort of place’. ‘Nothing is too big. Nicky always gets you to dream big.’ That freedom has had tangible consequences. An earlier Jupiter collaboration pushed Mendick to explore themes in her work and gave her a platform that she says ultimately led to a Sky Arts Award. ‘Having that openness and connection really does make artists better or allows artists to be free.’
Twenty-six years after buying a crumbling house and some unwanted land, perhaps that’s what the Wilsons have really been building all along: not simply a sculpture park, but somewhere that gives artists permission to go big and go home.
Find out more at the Jupiter+Nation website.