Myth and Memory: Heath and Tais Rose Wae at Kelvedon Hall
Built around 1743 for the Wright family, Catholic landowners who held the estate for nearly four centuries Kelvedon Hall stands in the Essex countryside with quiet authority. Its U-shaped plan - a three-storey central block flanked by two-storey pavilions, embodies the restrained elegance of Georgian architecture. Yet it is what happened here in the twentieth century that gives Kelvedon its particular resonance.
In 1937, the house was purchased by Henry 'Chips' Channon, the American-born Conservative MP whose diaries have become one of the great chronicles of British social and political life between the wars. Settling in London after the First World War, Channon married into the Guinness family and became a fixture of society, his diaries recording intimate details of a world defined by privilege, ambition, and the tensions of empire in decline. Kelvedon appears repeatedly in his entries, its ‘dream-like qualities’ offering respite from the frenetic pace of his London life. He immediately commissioned his friend Gerald Wellesley - architect and heir to the Dukedom of Wellington - to enhance the house and grounds, creating a setting befitting his vision of English country life.
The hall has remained in the Channon family ever since, passing to Chips's son Paul, then to his grandson Henry, and now to Henry's widow, Katie Channon, who serves as custodian of the estate. Though long closed to the public, Katie Channon has begun opening Kelvedon's doors through carefully curated events and partnerships, transforming the house into a space where history and contemporary culture meet.
Between the 29th of September and 1st of October, this vision found full expression. As part of the artist-in-residency programme initiated by The Dot Project and HeritageXplore, Australian interdisciplinary artists Heath Wae and Tais Rose Wae undertook an immersive residency at Kelvedon, living and working on-site throughout the summer to create a new body of work in response to the estate's history and landscape. The resulting exhibition, The Garden Silhouettes, the Myth, offered visitors a rare opportunity to experience both the house and art made within it - a dialogue between past and present, memory and making.
Together at Kelvedon, the couple explored themes of impermanence, inheritance, and the porous boundaries between body, land, and time. The exhibition presented earth-hued paintings alongside suspended textiles, works that responded not only to Kelvedon's Adamesque interiors and architectural presence but to something more intangible: the accumulated weight of the house's stories, the traces left by those who inhabited it, the myths that places generate around themselves.
The Garden Silhouettes, the Myth felt less like an imposition on Kelvedon than a conversation with it. Where Jack Penny's Old Country at Elveden Hall interrogated the theatre of tradition through vivid tableaux of country house rituals, Heath and Tais Rose Wae approached their subject more quietly, more intimately. Their works did not dramatise Kelvedon's history but rather listened to it - tracing connections between the earth beneath the estate and the hands that have shaped it, between ancestral memory and the present moment, between what is visible and what must be felt.
The residency transforms how we might understand historic houses. Rather than monuments frozen in time, they become spaces where different temporalities can coexist: Chips Channon's glittering interwar society, the Wright family's centuries of Catholic stewardship, and now the meditative presence of two Australian artists whose work draws from entirely different traditions of land and making. In this layering, Kelvedon reveals itself not as a single story but as a palimpsest - each generation writing over and alongside what came before, none erasing the others entirely.
The partnership between The Dot Project and HeritageXplore continues to prove its worth. By bringing contemporary artists into dialogue with historic estates, the initiative asks what heritage means when it is activated rather than preserved, when it becomes a living material for new work rather than an object under glass. The Garden Silhouettes, the Myth suggested that the answer lies in precisely this kind of exchange: respectful, attentive, unafraid to let the old and new speak to each other on equal terms.
