Houghton Hall, in Norfolk, was commissioned by the first British Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole. The interiors of this Palladian house are sumptuous, with opulent ceilings designed by the architect William Kent. Although much of its art collection has been sold off for tax purposes, the state rooms still pack a punch with their lavish tapestries, chandeliers, four-poster beds and gilded furniture that formed the backdrop to many a political meeting and glittering royal reception, reflecting the power and prestige of the Walpole family.
It’s against this setting and in the magnificent parklands that we find Stephen Cox’s stone sculptures. Myth is the largest and most comprehensive group of work he has shown to date. It spans 40 years and includes pieces made and conceived in Italy, Egypt and the UK. Around 20 works have been placed within the landscape, while smaller ones sit strategically in the state rooms. The juxtaposition of these spare, beautiful and atavistic sculptures with their cultural and spiritual undercurrents, set against the extravagant 18th-century splendour, creates a subtle dialogue that is both surprising, yet inspired.
Cox is one of his generation’s most interesting sculptors, best known for his monolithic, often site-specific work. He is not afraid of grand themes. Early in his career, he was influenced by the grammar of American minimalism, artists such as Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. This purity has stayed with him despite a long sojourn in Italy, where he kept a studio in the American Academy and was influenced by the great painters and sculptors of the Quattrocento. A love of Indian art was first fostered by a Phaidon book won as a school art prize. Then, in 1985, he was invited by the British Council to represent Britain at the Sixth Indian Triennale. This resulted in setting up a longstanding studio in the deep south, among the ancient Pallava and living sthapathy sculptors of Mamallapuram. Fundamental to Cox’s practice is a fascination with the mythologies of ancient religions, especially those of the Indian subcontinent and Egypt.
The first work encountered on entering the house is Maquette for Cycladic Gemini 2018, carved in pale Egyptian Alabaster. These stylised representations of human forms embody the history of art from ancient times to Picasso. A gold seam running through them conjures the golden joinery or ‘kintsugi’ used to mend Japanese porcelain; a symbol that imperfection can be found even within the beautiful. Placed in some of the alcoves of the grand rooms are a number of small bowls that include Gemini Bowls 2019. These modest ‘libation’ bowls made from Imperial Porphyry suggest a spiritual purity, even a ritual cleansing. Coming across them here is as surprising as glimpsing Gandhi in his loincloth walking the corridors of Buckingham Palace. Transitional objects between the everyday and the metaphysical act as reminders that art is born from material to become something transformative. Despite being made by a living artist, they might be centuries old, as could the sinuous bodily forms Thin 2008, fashioned in green Hammamat Breccia, and Hermaphrodite – Mappa Mundi 2002, made from Egyptian Porphyry. Displayed, here, on white marble console tops among 18th century busts and objects, these small ‘figures’ have the aura of devotional objects plundered from some ancient temple. There are also echoes of Freud’s collection of Egyptian and Greek artefacts on his desk in Maresfield Gardens, north London, reminders that both archaeological and psychological excavation is a process of transformation, as is the making of art.
Gouged, cut, honed and polished, a huge floor-bound monolith of Imperial Porphyry, Chrysalis 1989-91, lies on its side on the black and white marble floor of the Stone Hall. As the name implies, there’s a sense of something about to emerge from this hard, rough stone. Placed opposite another prone monolith, Dreadnought: Problems of History, the Search for Hidden Stone 2003, their presence disrupts the high artificiality of the 18th century architecture like a pair of dormant dinosaurs. The notion that stone comes to life through the hand of the carver echoes the ideas of the critic Adrian Stokes on the duality of carving and modelling. The belief that the ‘carver’ allows form to emerge through the medium of stone, whilst the ‘modeller’ sees the medium as so much ‘stuff’ on which to impose a preconceived idea.
A commission from the Cairo Opera House in 1989, not only saw Cox becoming immersed in the mythology and sculptural traditions of ancient Egypt, but also won him access to the source of the classical world’s rarest and prized stone, Imperial Porphyry. This can only be sourced from one quarry, Mons Porphyrius, deep in the desert. Rare and very hard, it was used in the Imperial Roman birthing chamber and for the great imperial sarcophagi. Cox was granted unique permission by the Egyptian Ministries of Culture and Geology to travel to the mine to procure it for his project.
Placed on the rolling lawns in the grounds are his ‘sarcophagi.’ Sitting directly opposite the house is Gilgamesh & Enkidu 2024, made from Black Aswan Granite. This monumental piece was born as much by chance as by Cox’s creative imagination. When the original boulder was split, the natural inclusions suggested a pair of x-rayed torsos, even ghostly faces similar to those found in the Turin Shroud. The mirroring image in the split stone reads like some sort of geological Rorschach ‘ink-blotch.’ They might also be seen as flayed and flattened hides, so that to think of Titian’s late Renaissance painting, the Flaying of Marsyas, doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
Interior Space: for Kephren, another huge sarcophagus, was also commissioned by the Egyptian government. This stood for several months in the desert on the axis of a pyramid, aligned with the rising sun on the plain of Giza. Sighted, now, outside Houghton Hall, it looks no less at home in the grounds of an English country house. From top to bottom there’s a perpendicular slit where the cut sliver of stone has been laid flat on the ground like a lowered door. There’s a strong urge to enter, as if the cold dark interior might be home to some ancient sibyl dispensing oracles.
Whilst most of Cox’s work is abstract, deeper in the grounds is a circle of Yoginis 200-10, carved in Charnockite (basalt) based on the life-sized images commissioned by a late Pallava ruler for a series of large figures for a circular temple dedicated to Yoginis. Slim-waisted, part voluptuous young woman, part bull or boar, these powerful divinities bridge the divide between ancient belief and the modernist artwork of Brancusi and Picasso.
Stephen Cox has said that stone is the beginning of everything. There is a relationship between this ancient material and cosmology, for, in its hewn and polished surfaces, we can glimpse the essence of stars, the universe in its making. Through its use Cox reaches out across millennia to touch the deep past and its civilisations: the Egyptians, the Minoans and the Roman Empire. to a time when the world was virgin and the great alluvial deposits being laid down would record the history of that past, for anyone with the imagination to look and read it.
Words and Photos Sue Hubbard © Artlyst 2025
Stephen Cox: Myth, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, 4 May – 28 September 2025
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic. She has published five collections of poetry, a book of short stories and four novels which have been translated into French, Italian and Mandarin.
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