Director of Postgraduate Research, School of Art & Architecture
In 1925, Stephen Tennant (1906–1987), perhaps the most intriguing of England’s ‘Bright Young Things’, contemplated a novel about “high life with a capital H & full of crude impossibilities”. He favoured amongst other titles The Monkey House, as well as Gutters of Gold. Despite his elaborate preparations, this book, like so many others imagined by Tennant during his life in a sequestered Wiltshire manor house, was never to materialise. Volker Eichelmann has resurrected Gutters of Gold as an intriguing visual essay. In this publication Eichelmann’s paintings, collages and photographs overlap and underlie Tennant’s drawings and personal ephemera. Reflections on landscape gardens and water-features, Greek antiquities and ruination, horticulture and eighteenth century découpage emerge as joint preoccupations that shift and expand in proximity as they unfold in a succession of scenarios conceived by Eichelmann under evocative chapter headings.
(from: Volker Eichelmann with Stephen Tennant, Gutters of Gold, Black Dog Publishing, 2017)
Centre for Useless Splendour 