Jupiter Artland
Edinburgh, Scotland



Recently, my colleague Mark went out to Edinburgh, Scotland and came back with all of these incredible photos of Edinburgh. While there, he visited a sculpture park that he reported as highly extraordinary, called Jupiter Artland. Basically the story of the park is that in 1999, a couple by the name of Nicky and Robert Wilson purchased a large manor house within an 100-acre estate. After living there a few years, Nicky, who had always been passionate about art, recognized that the formal gardens, fields and woodlands surrounding their historic house suggested the perfect site for a sculpture park.

The park is both a canvas for artist's installations, and a preserve of the natural landscape. Artists take full advantage of the incredible natural beauty inherent to this site by recognizing the specific physical attributes of the landscape as a feature--Andy Goldsworthy, Alec Findlay, Sara Barker, Anish Kapoor, Charles Jencks, and Ian Findlay are just a few a few of the artists and landscape designers whose work seamlessly connects with the physical landscape. So, if you are headed out to Scotland any time soon, it's a must see.

The renowned landscape architect, theorist and historian Charles Jencks work, Cells of Life,  recalls the process of Mitosis and fractal geometry.

The English sculptor Antony Gormley's work, entitled Firmament is a single 'expanded field' sculpture constructed from 1019 steel balls held in the space by 1770 steel elements of different lengths, welded together to create a non-regular, polygonal structure whose form dissolves and resolves in space.

Called A VARIETY OF CULTURES  by Scottish artist and poet Alec Finlay, this work was created for Jupiter Artland and is an essay in eco-poetics - it will grow, season by season. It consists of an orchard of native apple and plum varieties with the addition of oak ladders. Placed near the trees, which are still young, the measure of the ladders anticipates the eventual extent the pruned canopies will fill – when they do, visitors will be able to climb into the blossom, leaves and fruit. I love how it is simple, aesthetic and also measures time in a way that is interactive and engages so directly with the earth. Brilliant.


Stone House Bonnington, by artist and sculptor Andy Goldsworthy, is a structure built in Basalt stone (found 2 miles from the site) around an unearthed groundplane of bedrock stone beneath the existing landscape. Andy Goldsworthy produces site-specific sculpture and land art set in natural and rural settings. His art involves natural and found objects to create temporary and permanent sculptures that reflect the character of their environment. He is well known for his ephemeral pieces which are made from natural materials such as snow, ice, wood, flowers, leaves, sand, mud and twigs.

andy goldsworthy

Stone Coppice is also a work by site specific sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Here the artist engages with a what is known as a copse or coppice, which grouping of trees which have held seeded by throwing off shoots below ground to create a density. With this temporal piece, the artist has placed large boulders between the trunks, creating a tension between the two materials, the lightness of the trees juxtaposed with the weight/ volume of the boulders... and with time the trees will grown around them and the stone will eventually push into and grow with and into the tree trunks.

andy goldsworthy
