Fog and the Fall: A Review of Nick Jensen’s Residency at Belvoir Castle
This autumn, British artist Nick Jensen completed a month-long residency at Leicestershire’s dramatic 19th century castle, Belvoir. Rather than arrive with a preconceived plan, Jensen entered the castle as a sensitive observer living within its rooms, following its daily rhythms, and absorbing its atmospheres. His resulting paintings do not document the site; instead, they interpret its experience. Through gesture, scale, and material presence, Jensen prompts a reconsideration of the castle not as a fixed historical container, but as a space still actively shaped by perception and use.
Jensen’s practice, rooted in the fleetingness of attention, reveals how seeing is never neutral. His works demonstrate that even in environments steeped in tradition, meaning arises in subtle shifts and passing impressions: the glint of light on polished stone, the feeling of height in a vaulted ceiling, the slight anxiety of moving through rooms filled with ancestral portraiture. The residency provided fertile ground for these kinds of perceptual negotiations, and the following works selected for and from the exhibition amplify the push-and-pull between what a space dictates and what a viewer brings to it.
In the Fold (distemper and oil on linen, 200 × 400 cm) was installed within the castle’s entrance portico. Monumental yet porous, its surface seems to breathe, gesturing toward bodies that surge, retreat, and dissolve into earthy turbulence. As visitors pass beneath the painting, it creates a brief moment of suspension: before the castle becomes a place of inheritance, hierarchy, and spectacle, the viewer encounters a visceral field of sensation. This is a painting that refuses to behave like décor; it hovers like weather or memory, a first reminder that one’s experience of Belvoir will be mediated by feeling as much as by history.
Inside the castle, Jensen’s smaller figurative works introduce different forms of intimacy and tension. Boy Flying (acrylic and oil on linen, 45 × 35 cm) plays with the idea of weightlessness in a setting that is materially and symbolically heavy. The airborne figure floats against a muted ground, neither rising nor falling - a moment of freedom captured within a building designed to assert authority and permanence. Installed among elaborate wallpapers, the painting reads as a gentle interruption of the decorative environment, a reminder that joy and imagination often appear in quiet, unexpected pockets of space. It asks what kinds of play and uncertainty might still reside within walls that long served to structure behaviour.
In the library, the work Abstract Castle (distemper and oil on linen, 105 × 80 cm) proposes a more speculative form of looking. Rather than depict the building’s recognizable silhouette, Jensen dissolves ornament into suggestion: buttresses and turrets are hinted at only through directional strokes and shifting tonalities. The composition feels like the castle in motion: remembered rather than seen, filtered through the sensory immediacy of Jensen’s time living inside it. In a room filled with meticulous catalogues of knowledge, the painting embraces uncertainty - as though understanding a place requires not only recorded facts but also the emotional and perceptual disturbances it generates.
Belvoir Castle’s collaboration with The Dot Project revives an important tradition: that of historic estates acting as active patrons of contemporary creativity rather than static guardians of the past. Jensen’s residency demonstrates how powerful that commitment can be. His paintings reveal that history is not something we merely observe; it is something we experience, challenge, reinterpret, and feel.
Ultimately, the exhibition leaves Belvoir gently transformed. Jensen lowers the barrier between the castle’s grand architectural body and the people who enter it. Through shifts in scale, softness of mark and placement that encourages fresh navigation, his work invites visitors to perceive heritage as something living: as susceptible to emotion and perception as any human body. In this way, the past becomes not heavier, but more alive.
