A pile of previously unloved tree cuts attached to rope sit on cheap plywood in a room with fine floorboards and beautiful walnut doors.
In an architecturally remarkable hallway is a discarded lump of sandstone, suspended among the immaculately crafted colonnades and some of the finest stonemasonry to be found anywhere in the UK. Elsewhere, ordinary slate roof tiles have been gathered together and look like they can be toppled like dominoes at any time.
“I am literally bringing the landscape into the house,” said the Turner prize-nominated artist Ingrid Pollard. “But there is a tension. It is the finished and unfinished.”
Pollard is English Heritage’s first visual art fellow and has spent the last year creating works that respond to Belsay Hall and its gardens in Northumberland.
Belsay is recognised as one of England’s earliest Greek revival houses. It is modelled on the Temple of Hephaestus in Athens and was designed by its perfectionist owner, Sir Charles Monck, in the early 19th century, drawing on the style of buildings he had seen during his two-year honeymoon in Greece.
Monck was rich, driven and ruthless, demolishing a nearby village that spoiled the view and rebuilding it further away from his parkland.
Belsay and its history, landscape and geology has provided rich pickings for Pollard, who is one of a number of artists overlooked for decades by the art establishment but finally getting the wider recognition they deserve.
“For a long time people just didn’t pay any attention to what I was doing,” Pollard said. The art world often overlooked artists who were black and women unless “Charles Saatchi said ‘this person is important’”.
Things are changing. “I think it is because of the change of personnel in the galleries and museums with younger curators who came in and who grew up with Bob Marley and Maya Angelou … It was like ‘where is the work of those people? Oh no, we haven’t got it in!’”
How long it would last was another question, she added.
Pollard said she never set out to be famous, or make work that sold for big money. She was motivated to make work that could change society. “I kind of accepted being on the margins and just kept going until something changed.”
The exploration of Belsay has coincided with her moving from north London to rural Northumberland, although she is keen to play down how big a move that really is.
“London is just lots of villages stuck very close together, isn’t it?” she said. “Where I’m living there’s a farming community and lots of artists around. And there’s cows and sheep.”
The Belsay exhibition, which opens to the public on Saturday, has a series of interventions and installations across the house and its otherworldly quarry gardens, from where the sandstone for the house came.
As well as using wood, sandstone and slate, Pollard has created fragments of wallpaper, voile screens for windows and in the gardens there are unexpected mirrors in the cracks and fissures of the old quarry.
Pollard’s fellowship is a partnership with Newcastle University and has been co-funded by the Bartlett endowment fund.
The show itself is one of a number of contemporary art shows staged at Belsay in recent years, with its empty rooms providing something of a blank canvas for artists.
Penelope Sexton, English Heritage’s senior creative programme manager, said it was about artists looking at “wonderful old buildings” in new ways.
“Ingrid Pollard has spent the past year doing just that,” she said. “It has been so interesting to watch her tease out the layers of history at Belsay, ones that don’t necessarily fit in with the obvious narratives.”
• There Is Light in the Fissures is at Belsay from 10 February-14 July.
